As the co-host and moderator of the LinkedIn Ruby-on-Rails group, I administrate the discussions and posting traffic... - and a common question about "certification" regularly gets posted in the forum. Many engineers seem to feel that a certification is some type of confirmation of coding abilities. Often fellow group contributors will comment that code examples and code reviews are the best way to demonstrate coding abilities and coding styles.
Github (www.github.com) allows software engineers to collaborate with other engineers on open source projects... (as does the Eclipse Foundation (www.eclipse.org)), but Github provides secured code storage, collaboration management tools, team management, code reviews, and networking opportunities with peers.
It also gives software engineers a place to host, store, and provide hiring managers with a secure venue to "see your work" and review your code. Just don't put "any old thing" up there... - and definitely do not put code that you yourself were not responsible for solely developing. School projects will work - but hiring managers don't want to see that you were able to figure out the "hello world" program... - And they certainly do not want to spend all day trying to review.
Code examples are "almost" a requirement in technical interviewing and evaluations these days... and having code on a secure and well-known forum like Github is a smart part of any software engineer's employment search strategy.
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