As OSS participants, I think it is important to keep your contributions documented. Contribution is not limited to pushing code. Forums, documentation, IRC, StackOverflow, even twitter are all avenues to "helping out". Sadly, potential employers, and even other developers, never see all of this effort you put forth.
The solution to this problem could be an app that aggregates all of this data into a simple "timeline". Github, Google Groups/forums, StackOverflow, IRC, etc. could all be potential sources. Data would never be deleted. This would be a free service with sponsors.
I feel there are a lot of developers that think they need to gain "fame" by creating a popular gem/tool. I believe this is why there is so much unnecessary code out there. You can't blame them - having popular code will definitely increase your odds of landing a better job.
Wouldn't it be nice if just as many developers focused their efforts on documentation and help/issues/support as the number of developers that focus on code? Do we really need 457 state machine, file upload, and authentication libraries? The desire for recognition might be the cause of this.
Please tell me your thoughts/ideas/opinions!
Thank you
Brian Hogan tweeted (https://twitter.com/bphogan/status/210923801922379776):
It's not clear to me what problem you're trying to solve. Better docs or showcasing developers' hard work. Clarify in the gist?
To put this solution in two sentences:
"So what have kind of work have you done? What have you been up to?"
"[gives link to app] Here you go, see for yourself :)"
@joshuaclayton I'm more interested in the details - nothing fancy. You can learn a lot about a developer from the way they handle a Github issue or even simply with how consistent they are with "helping out". For me, Coderwall offers nothing in this respect - "badges" tell me nothing.
I agree with your points on why so much unnecessary code exists.