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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I am pretty sad about this, because this is gone due to people getting butthurt about other's contribution numbers or some sort of comparison, rather than what it was good for: A self-motivating tool.

The notion of "cheating" the contribution graph is senseless, because it's not a competition. However, what it was great for was motivation to yourself to write code (however minor) every day.

I used the streak count to help push myself to keep working on a project I would've otherwise quickly set aside. My last streak was 27 days. I found when I broke a streak, my motivation to commit was much lower, and I would let my project lie for several days at a time.

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Yeah, I'm sad about this too. I sort of knew the counter was there, but never paid any attention to it... until very recently. I started to use it as a self-motivating tool to always do even minimum amount of work one of the numerous after-hours projects I have.

So now that I started to use it, they cut it out. sigh

There is an analogous productivity method called "Don't Break the Chain" involving a prominently-placed real calendar, and big red crosses denoting daily successes. It triggers the same (rightly) proud sensation. Anecdotally I preferred it to GitHub streaks (as I rarely look at my profile).

Any habit tracker site/app will also do this for you - I automate mine with GitHub API data, and get a similar effect (the app notifies of streaks daily).

Do you have an example app that will do this for you?

I use coach.me - the automation is via their undocumented mobile APIs https://github.com/jmaddi/liftapp-client (Lift is coach.me's previous branding)

I like https://chains.cc/, though I'm not aware of any way to automate it.

Commit on iOS is a well made example.

OrgMode also handles this out of the box (or at least what you'd call out of the box on OrgMode...)

I use dontbreakthechain.com

Definitely same here. I started working on some personal projects for Github this winter and ended up getting a long streak of about a month from it. Since then, I've been in the habit of getting long streaks and try to do 2+ commits every day, but as soon as I fall off that streak it takes me 2-3 days to think about contributing again. Not only does it motivate me to write code (almost) every day (which I'd argue is important to developing programming skill), but it also pushes me to share code I was already going to write, which I think is a win-win for everybody.

I'm with you. I liked the steak count as a source of personal motivation, but we still have that don't we? Now you need to look at the squares, but an unbroken sequence of colored squares is just as motivating as a number, isn't it?

Then why remove the numbers? Counting squares is a pain. They should at least let you see these numbers on your own profile. Mind you, someone could easily make a browser extension to do this, basically.

The problem with a browser extension is that it wouldn't count commits past 365 days. Would be better to leave the feature in and have a browser extension to opt out of it.

I'm kind of surprised streaks and such, are things people feel so strongly about. This is how it's used in my product.

http://imgur.com/5uy9DSp

The heatmaps are created based on the search results, so if you want to see your contributions, you'll just search for your email. Searches are at the branch level and you can search across multiple branches from different repositories, and so forth.

My intentions for the heatmaps was never to help you visualize commit streaks though. Their purpose was to help you visualize search results, to make it easier for you to drill into certain timelines.

But it only shows up to 1 year...

I wish they made the number available on the page only the account owner could see.

Non-broken streaks are also how Seinfeld keeps motivated:

http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...

That's how I was using the feature. Now I'm sad it's gone.

Agreed, mine was the only streak I ever paid attention to and for the last few months it really kept me going, making at least one little contribution per day.

I've seen a few applicants who had faked Github profile graph data. I found this a good indicator of the developer personality/ethics, and we happily passed on them.

If you've passed on them how could you know whether or not it was actually a good indicator of personality/ethics?

How do you fake it? And how do you know if someone's faked it? :S

By using tools like Rockstar - https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar

(PS: I wrote it)

https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti and similar are pretty easy to spot. As a user I'd be biased to someone who used that for fun over someone who ('faking' or in all seriousness) has a ton of repos with lots of activity that are ultimately just things like node's left-pad...

Checking their actual commits. If their activity is menial like adding a letter to a file over and over, they obviously aren't legitimately writing that much code.

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