Why I’m Ending my GitHub Streak after 844 Days

I only consciously started paying attention to my streak a while back. I'm up to 33 days (today will make 34 once I push something). I have been using the "streak focus" to motivate me to make lots of "easy, but useful" changes to a large existing codebase.

Specifically, I have thousands of lines of Groovy/Grails code that I've written over the past few years, where I lazily used "println" to output debug messages, instead of using the log object and the corresponding debug/info/error/warn/whatever call. So now, everyday, I grep through the code, find a file with some println's in it, change some number of them (anywhere from 2 or 3, up to dozens), then commit that.

It's a small thing, but over time it's improving the code base, and pushing my streak up as well. And since I'm visiting every file (eventually) including ones I maybe otherwise wouldn't touch, it's also a chance to sometimes wind up removing dead code, outdated/useless comments, etc.

And of course all this is mixed in with the actual development work on the project as well.

I doubt I'll get to 844 days, but that's OK. It's fun and it's a way to help keep things moving forward.

Meanwhile, John Resig is about to hit 700 days: https://github.com/jeresig

Well done. The haters will come in and pick apart each commit and why it wasn't worthy - but you've already won by that point.