Well said. These types of blog posts create the sense of a needless dichotomy where you either code 24 hours a day or 5 hours a day and there's no in-between.

I really don't have much of a github presence, but then again I'm not a day-to-day coder at work. The presence I do have I created in just a couple of hours and I could easily beef it up to something respectable by spending a couple of hours a month on it.

This has to be one of the best comments I've seen on this whole issue. Way too many devs seem to think it's a massive undertaking and they need a giant project. Hiring engineers don't even want to go through 100000 lines of code (they have lives as well!). Even starting by uploading your dot files is something and takes all of 10 minutes (with the added bonus of having them available if you need to switch machines).

I agree with this sentiment. I personally loathe white board coding as it has little in common with day to day work and would much rather discuss some real working code as part of an interview

When I am assigned a code test for a job interview, I publish my solution on github. It's not a side project, but that's code that I wrote that other interviewers can look at. No big deal