I used to update all my fun and side projects in the Github as public repo. Even if it has any ugly code or clean code, I used to ship it.

Following are the reasons:

1. I can see my actual growth, by looking all the repos of all the stages. With that I can guide anyone easily.
2. Generally I used to get feedback from online folks. If I ship with ugly (or) bad code, I might get a better solution from them to improve. This is also one way of learning.

Personally I believe that only guys who have written bad code can write clean code.

So I don't worry about that will keep shipping my code.

If I am writing a tutorial or a sample project for others to read and understand, I always upload code that I am proud of. If it's an internal experiment or side project for fun I try to give my best, but occasionally leave bugs or unoptimised code. But do I come back and improve things? It depends on whether I want to move ahead with the project. If yes, I redo the project properly.

I always do. Public repos are like USB drives to me. lol

At the time, I thought this code was beautiful: github.com/sunnysingh/database/blob/master/databa…

I'm super ashamed of it now, of course. Jeez, why did I hate whitespace so much? But even though that was 5 years ago, I'm still ashamed of code that I wrote 1 year ago. We all improve over time, and I think that's a good reason to actually keep that old code public. The same way that you can search basic StackOverflow questions from now well-known developers.

Some people have code in _private_ repositories that they have no business signing LOL.

In all seriousness though, I think newbies are the only people who assume that everything on GitHub is a reflection of your actual coding ability. It simply isn't; especially in cases where the developer obvious deserted their GitHub and has random crap up from years ago.