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Changing My GitHub Username

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally renamed my GitHub account. Since I made the account (through my entire undergraduate degree in computer science and my entire professional life), I've used a not so creative username from my community college email1 that I had at the time. I haven't always been a super creative person, so when I enrolled at Virginia Tech, I used the same id.

A Quick Detour To GitLab

When I started my undergraduate degree, GitHub private repos were not free for general use. They were free for student accounts, of which I was, but at some point early in my undergraduate degree, my account got borked and I never figured out why. As a result, I was not able to create private repos on GitHub.

I switched to GitLab to work around this and spent several years there. Some of my older projects still live on there to this day (though I have migrated all of them to GitHub, most as private repos). I even experimented with a self hosted instance of GitLab for a very brief period of time. Fast forward to January 7, 20192 and private repos become free on GitHub.

Why Would I Do This?

Great question. It is a fair point that I have so many repos now that span across many projects, computers and services I've developed over the years, but takeing another perspective, this is the perfect time, because I will only keep growing my repos, and renaming will become more and more tedious or down right impossible. I also have the additional benefit of a very, very unique username. GitHub will forward old references to my previous username until it is registered with a new account. I don't think there is a huge change this will ever happen, at least in my lifetime.

This just gives me a chance to claim another username in my quest to become the automas. Sadly, automas is already taken, and so automas.net, but this gave me a great change to unify my github username with the website domain. I registered automas.dev to continue this new brand.

  1. The community college provided each student with an email address starting with their 3 (or 2) initials followed by 4 random numbers. The regular expression for this format is [a-z]{2,3}[0-9]{4} ↩

  2. https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/new-year-new-github/ ↩