Commit to Keep Coding – GitHub + Beeminder

I'm the Bee in Beeminder. I think that beeminding your github account is going to be amazing for hackers/founders -- a way to force yourself to always be making forward momentum. We've been tracking how much code we write for over a year now -- though in a bit more structured way. We track user visible improvements (it has to be something worthy of tweeting @beemuvi for the hardcore fans of beeminder). We've been doing one-per-day for 733 days now and if we ever fall behind we pay a user $1000. It's been invaluable in keeping us going!

Summary for those not familiar with the craziness that is Beeminder: It's a combination of quantified-self tool and a commitment device app (like StickK and GymPact and Aherk) where you put up money, to be paid if you don't do what you said you were going to do. In this case you're pledging to push commits or close issues a certain number of times per week.

The money aspect sounds super perverse, but we think of it as paying a fee for a service (the graphs, reminders, etc) that happens to be waived if you never need Beeminder's kick in the pants.

Very cool - anyone who's following pg's advice to "stay alive" would be well advised to git committing :)

I don't think counting commits is a good metric, because I know if it were me, I would start splitting my commits up into trivial changes in order to meet the count ("added comment", "added line break", etc).

It supports going by issues, which is better, but how about counting additions/deletions?

Can we get details about the way this is implemented?

I assume you poll Github on some timescale? I noticed that Beeminder took around 24h to see my commits.

I want folks to commit to removing bugs!