Why Most of My GitHub Repos Just Went Private

If you visit github.com/nerdymark lately, it looks a lot emptier than it used to. That's on purpose. I did a round of reputation management across my accounts recently, and the biggest single change was flipping the majority of my GitHub repositories to private. Most of what I build isn't on that page anymore, and a change that visible deserves more explanation than a note in a profile README.

Two kinds of private

The repos that went dark fall into two buckets:

• Personal. Home lab, hardware, and household projects that touch my own network, my own devices, and my family. They're not much use to anyone else, and more importantly, they're not something I want indexed. There's no good reason for search engines and scrapers to have a map of my house.
• Portfolio. Work I'm glad to walk through in a hiring or collaboration conversation, but that I keep off the public timeline by choice. Code walked through in context, with a person, tells a much better story than code sitting in a search result.

Asking for access is welcome

Private doesn't mean sealed. If you're evaluating my work or have a specific reason to look, reach out on LinkedIn or Bluesky and I'm generally happy to share read access. The point of the change is control over who's looking and why, not hiding the work.

What I can't take is contributions

One policy applies to every repository I own, public or private: no pull requests, no patches, no feature requests, no design input. That isn't unfriendliness. My employment agreement and the professional credentials I hold make outside contribution a conflict I'd rather avoid outright than manage case by case. Everything in these repos is written by me, on my own time and my own equipment, and I intend to keep the provenance that clean. A single well-meaning PR muddies a story that's currently very simple to tell.

A note for recruiters

Related, since the portfolio bucket exists for exactly this conversation: I'm quickly approaching a ten-year milestone at Apple. I'm not actively searching - but a window of opportunity is open right now, and it may close once I commit to another decade. If you have something genuinely interesting, now is the time to ask. LinkedIn and Bluesky links are above, and the repos are one message away.