How to Show Engineering Ownership When the Repositories Are Private

I have spent more than six years shipping production software and I have no public repositories worth showing you. Everything substantial I have written at work lives in private repositories belonging to the companies I wrote it for, and confidentiality obligations do not lapse when a role ends. So I cannot hand you the code, and I am not going to. That is not caution for its own sake. An engineer who sends a prospective employer another company's source code has told you exactly what they will do with yours. The restraint is part of what you are assessing, and I would want the same restraint applied to my work later. Which leaves a real problem. "I was the principal author of the web application" and "I contributed to the web application" are the same sentence to a reader who cannot check either. Most engineering CVs resolve this by getting louder. I think the only honest resolution is to publish the measurement method rather than the artefact, in enough detail that someone familiar with the tools can judge the figure on its own terms without ever seeing the repository. Here is the method I actually used, what it does badly, and the places where applying it forced me to shrink a claim I would have preferred to keep. Three measurements, in increasing order of rigour All-branch commit count. Total authored activity. Do not use this. It counts abandoned branches, spikes and experiments, and it inflates — usually in favour of whoever is most willing to commit. It is the number that makes contribution graphs look impressive and says the least about a codebase. Production-branch commit count, scoped to tenure. What reached customers, while you were there. Better, because it excludes work that never shipped, and because scoping to tenure stops you either taking credit for years of history that predate you or being penalised for them. But it still counts commits, and a commit is a unit of activity, not a unit of code. Commit share rewards granular committers and punishes p