That's the beauty of it being published on Github. I can look at the project and see if it was just a `git push` of something meaningless or if it's actually well thought out and demonstrates ability.

That may show an ability to write software. But shipping and putting them on production servers is still different v

Shipping is different than deploying server-side code. Going from concept to execution is shipping, and it's what I look for in a candidate. Again, this has worked out very well for me. An added bonus is if you hire OSS contributors, they tend to attract more OSS contributors.