Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs
blog.github.com
blog.github.com
I'd love to see GitHub selling physical tokens that measure this. She did a fantastic job with this project -- but applying it to a commercial side as part of the shop would be cool. I'm not sure how well anything like this can scale, though.
I'd also like to see more exploration beyond the contribution graph for measuring impact. I know it's not perfect, but it is neat.
Let's see how long that lasts.
I have had assholes scrape my commits for the commit e-mail address, and spam me already.
Give it time.
"Do you have a GitHub profile?" Is a question thats making me raise an eyebrow more and more lately, what if I don't? What's that say about me that I'm not constantly constantly distributing my code to everyone else via public repositories?
Yes I have a github profile but all you're going to find is a Jekyll site where I blog about model airplanes and geek off about air traffic control chatter. Doubt that's very interesting content for a guy who works in fintech
god I hope this is exaggerated lol.
Filthy recruiter, how can they even ask such a question. How dare they ask whether I make tech world better outside my job. Muh keeds, muh family.
> my code
The one that is built on titanic effort of others not all of which was compensated in any way at all?
Do other jobs have such benefits? Remote work all over the globe for example? The fact that everyone needs IT these days and so you have tons of work? Nice comfy offices? Apples to oranges won't fly.
> And also what should you do?
Find a work-life balance instead of answering a fair question with a defensive silly question of your own (I ain't even a recruiter and that answer right there made me lol, imagine a guy having to listen to that defensive shit and still having to try and salvage a candidate because he may have strict job requirements). And by that balance I mean either work your ass off to produce quality code in your spare time and stand out among candidates or don't and someone else will stand out instead.
Also check out the irony with this 'my code' stuff too. That's exactly why you have to work ass off in spare time: because every employer goes 'quack! it's my code, don't show it to anyone' so you can't share it with another recruiter.
Stack overflow, Google, Apple, etc have contributed significantly more to the tech world than 99% of open source projects. Ruling out developers from closed source projects is myopic.
>The one that is built on titanic effort of others not all of which was compensated in any way at all?
This is how open source works. Either you are cool with giving away code without compensation that others will use or you aren't. You can't have it both ways.
I say all of this as a huge open source advocate btw.
So I can either get you to do a coding excercise (but who has time for that, especially when you may have three other offers already) or I can ask for a sample of your code. When I ask candidates if they have a GitHub profile, I ask because that’s where most people have samples of code they’ve worked on. If you don’t, just tell me and send me a zip of some code so I can see how you actually write code.
If you don’t even have that, well sorry, but I’m getting plenty of CVs through everyday.
It also works the other way, maybe you aren’t good at interviews but you know you are a good developer. List on your CV some of your interesting projects with GitHub links (or put “code available on request”).
If you have a full supply of well qualified candidates, good for you because you are in the minority. However, most company's candidates are garbage and the last ones you want to lose are the ones with three competing offers.
Tell them you need a code sample, don't make stupid decisions based on presence of a github profile if you want to hire anyone above a junior level.
This obsession with commits as "contributions" is demeaning.
https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-yo...
“- Committing to a repository's default branch or gh-pages branch - Opening an issue - Proposing a pull request - Submitting a pull request review - Co-authoring commits in a repository's default branch or gh-pages branch”
I'm a bit sad they removed the "punch card" in the projects statistic.
This was a great tool to see if a project was a side project from a lone individual or something with people paid to work on it daily from 9am to 6pm.
(I tend to prefer the second in my choice of dependencies, because there are less likely to be abandoned).
To hook in on the rest of the debate. It might not be the best measure to qualitatively or even quantitatively compare developer contributions. But a physical token as memento would definitely be an awesome way to be thanked for contributing to a project instead of the old buy-me-a-coffee-button.
Something fun I did with the contribution graph a couple of years ago. Lets you play Conway's Game of Life (sort of) with the graph. More crowded contribution graphs make for slightly less interesting generations. You can enable/disable cells if you'd like.
But what I found was very neat about the contribution graph, and why I was so disappointed they removed the streak counts, was it was a good self-motivational tool. As a hobbyist coder, having an encouragement to keep a streak going by looking at code (either mine, or someone else's), and try to improve it in some way on a daily basis was a really good push for me.
I think it's obvious from my full contribution graph (visible at https://github-contributions.now.sh/ under my username) where I was using the contribution graph/streaks to encourage me to contribute more in late 2015 and early 2016, and you can see how much it fell off when they removed the streak count in May of 2016.
Which is to say, healthily used, you can be honest with yourself and use it to encourage yourself to continue participating, but obviously, it's bad as a metric of how much a person codes in general.
Just use the date parameter of the git commit command: git commit --date "Foo Jan 1 00:00:01 CEST 2011" -m "What".
Is there no API for contribution graphs, or formula that GitHub uses to generate these based on previous activity?
I wonder if people "game" the system here (since apparently it's an important metric). For example, you could split a commit in two ...