How Engineers Can Prove Code Ownership Without Sharing Private Repositories

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A software engineer with over six years of production experience argues that private repositories need not prevent candidates from demonstrating engineering ownership on their CVs. The author warns against sharing proprietary source code with prospective employers, framing such restraint as a mark of professional integrity. Instead, they advocate publishing the measurement methodology itself — using Git tools like git blame with specific flags — so that technical reviewers can assess contribution claims without ever accessing the codebase. The piece breaks down three metrics: all-branch commit counts (dismissed as inflated), production-branch commit counts scoped to tenure (better but still limited), and git blame analysis on the production branch (considered the most authoritative measure of surviving authorship). The author details how deterministic file sampling and conservative blame flags make the figures independently verifiable and harder to manipulate.

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