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Comment by ivanfon | Hacker News Reader

The other project, GitGardener[1] is... not necessarily sketchy, but it's obviously designed to make your Github look "better" than it really is (not that the contribution chart matters for anything, but that seems like what the service is trying to convey).

1: https://www.gitgardener.com/

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I'm not gonna lie. From the perspective of somebody that commits every day with purpose, this is even more scammy then selling email spam-list. This invalidates my hard work.

Hopefully you have more to show for your hard work than some green squares on your github profile that nobody really cares about.

It only invalidates your hard work if the purpose of your work is to populate your GitHub commit history.

your hard work should be finished products not npm module spam of the next left-pad

My thoughts exactly, if you're holding yourself to commit every single day your commits are probably not meaningful or are so broken up that reading your repos history is a nightmare.

Just because you can commit every day means absolutely nothing if the commits are garbage.

They should add a feature that releases daily

It's pretty gross that someone is trying to monetize this. There's actually FOSS version that draws pixel art in your contribution history: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti It's pretty funny, though it doesn't look like its actively maintained anymore. To quote from one of the issue threads:

What better way to demonstrate that the commit graph is a not an indicator of a profile's importance? Hopefully someone who sees gitifi style art in the graph will immediately realize that they should take it with a grain of salt, and instead read the code.

It's not gross. More power to them if they can find someone who finds it worthwhile to pay them $10/mo for it. Or even $10,000/mo.

You're right, gross is a strong word. I don't mean to bash a dev who is producing something they are passionate about while at the same time providing a service to others.

What I will say is that that over-incentivizing active commit histories leads to weird market solutions like this one. The problem isn't a product that populates your commit history for a fee, the problem is an over reliance on arbitrary GitHub commits as a proxy for developer talent.

I had a previous employer that started counting commits. Doesn't matter what you do, if you had to spend you whole day interacting directly with a customer(or even at that customer location trying to figure out some issue), nothing mattered. Only the number of commits. Not even the commit size mattered.

So I started doing tiny commits to counter that.

I would gladly use this thing as a f* you before leaving.

Your story brought to mind this bit of Apple folklore[0], wherein Bill Atkinson, the author of QuickDraw, reported his weekly LOC as -2,000 after implementing optimizations.

[0] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

That's pretty common, my contribution to my current work is surely in the negative as well due to the massive amount of spaghetti code I had to refactor.

Oh good lord, that's just filthy.

But man would it be hilarious to grill someone during an interview about this. "Oh wow! You're coding even on holidays! How about we do a quick look at your commits and you can tell us about your progress on some of these projects?"

I know some people who use g̶i̶t̶ ̶g̶a̶r̶d̶e̶n̶e̶r̶ gitfiti to draw on their commit history. Like NES and Atari sprites, like Pacman or Galaga. It's just meant to be a funny subversion of people who take GitHub graphs a little too seriously.

I've never had someone ask about my GitHub and it's on my resume. Probably because it's fairly inactive and I regularly take down projects I'm not proud of.

What's the benefit?

Is someone getting a interview or a job because they have a trivial useless repo spammed with commits?

I can't imagine anything more suspicious looking than that! I'm guessing the US isn't the target audience here.

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