I submitted a feature request to GitHub recently and was wondering if this really made sense.

Two situations: 1. Academic courses (MOOCs included) require students not to publish progress/code publicly during a course 2. You worked on a personal project, which you don't want to make public because you believe you have other plans with it. But you still want to be able to show it to selected people (such as a prospective employer)

But having a version controlled repository is really helpful in both these scenarios. It's also important for one other thing, specific people (professors, potential employer etc.) to know of what your approach to assignments/learnings from the course was. At the moment, there is no way of showing someone the depth of learning/work you did during a course/project unless you mail them the zipped repo.

I believe, link-based sharing for private repositories with view-only access would be incredibly useful. This would allow prospective employers/academic faculty to access this link (lets say from a CV) while still maintaining Honor Code compliance or personal interests. Adding someone as a collaborator to a private project just to show them your code does not make sense. It might help students/developers to choose who has access to their private repositories.

Let me know what you think!