A basic README template for your projects on GitHub

There's a saying that goes:

"A Github repo without a README is like a couple without love..."

Okay, fine, no such saying exists, but since I keep running into a countless number of repos with no description, no instructions, no screenshot or demo, I decided to make available to you a template compatible with most of your projects, even those still under development (link available at the end of the article).

Why do you need a readme file?

We sometimes think that a project under development doesn't need a readme, because after all, no one is going to want to use it until it's at least somewhat finished.

And even if that's true in theory, a project's page can be visited for many reasons, including:

• Keeping up to date with the project's progress
• Looking for a project similar to one's own in order to save effort and draw inspiration from it
• Assessing the cleanliness of the code
• Learning more about how a developer handles their project management

All these reasons make your project deserve a nice home page, even if it's not a finished project, and especially if you're a junior developer looking for a job!

If I want to learn more about a developer's skills, how can I assess the code of a project if I don't even know what said project is supposed to do?

The answer is simple: It's impossible.

Moreover, a readme file is precisely the perfect place to explain that a project is under development and that the code may not yet be perfectly clean, that it still contains leftover logs and debugging methods that will be removed later!

The template

What better place to host a readme for your Github projects than... Github, of course! The template contains all the comments needed to make it easy to reuse, so no more excuses for not adding one to your projects, even the simplest ones!

Link to the Github project: https://github.com/NicolasBrondin/basic-readme-template

Bonus: If you haven't read it yet, I recommend checking out my previously published article on my blog titled "How to Host a Demo for Free on GitHub".