isthisfree

As an employer that does the same thing as the person who wrote the article; I do, of course, look at the seriousness of whatever is on that Github profile.

I am usually easily able to tell if it is a half-baked project for some hobby-thing or active participation in e.g. a well known piece of open source software.

Someone who does this, is likely also skilled enough to separate those things. I don't only look at the user's own repos but also at contributions/comments etc. to others.

And just as the author, I too experience more often than not that people have NO idea how to set the level for own experience.

Seems more like an ad than anything else.

As someone who hires people in my own company and who asks this question the reason is quite different from your understanding.

I would hate to insult a candidate with an offer and always asks people to tell me how much they want to take the role.

Most people responds by saying "today I make xxx". And if they, as many people do, say "I don't know, it is hard for me to decide" I will ask them how much they make today and ask them if they feel satisfied with that.

To me it seems like 80% of candidates have a very hard time at negotiating salary because they really want the job. I will never, ever ask these things to try lowering the salary cost. I do ask these things to ensure a fair offer.

... but I guess it can be understood as you say it here as well. Never thought of that. That is valuable to know.

If you can automate DNS, create a wildcard LE cert and have a cronjob to maintain it around your different places from the one place you issue it. That is what I do.

Before that I just bought one wildcard cert and used that. Can be bought at less than 50 bucks and then no hassle.

If I could not automate DNS and I don't have 50 bucks per year for it, I would create a small CA myself, trust it in my browsers and issue certificates from that.