177 Days of GitHub | Hacker News Reader

177 Days of GitHub

ryanseys.com

77 pointsryanseys40 comments

I'm currently on day 252 of a streak: https://github.com/waywardmonkeys/

Most days are pretty easy. Being that I maintain a large project (Open Dylan), there is almost always a simple bug to fix, documentation to improve, typos to correct, bugs to file, pull requests to merge from others.

It has been great for keeping things moving and making sure that every day, I make at least a little bit of progress. Every day, at least a tiny step forward.

Wow that's amazing! Good for you, keep it up!

It makes sense that this sort of thing is easier if you own a larger project. That sounds like a great way to EDBC = Every day be coding.

Are you aiming for the "at least one commit per day", or did this happen naturally as you worked on Open Dylan?

I aim for it. Clearly before the streak started, I was much more intermittent with some days passing without visible progress. :)

I find your streak particularly impressive, since it is all public contributions. The authors streak (as well as any, much shorter, streak that I have made) has always relied much more heavily on private repos for personal projects.

I appreciate your contributions much more!

Right behind you with 230 days: https://github.com/zsiciarz

The contribution graph is in my opinion really a great motivational tool. Seems to work better for me than projects like Julython, however I'm guilty of a few single-commit days fixing a typo or updating some dependency packages. Looking forward to 365!

I tried the same thing a few months ago (this lasted 58 days), but some days you just don’t want to work.

A few notes:

- it’s the time of the commit which is important, not the push. So you can contribute on your projects locally if you don’t have Internet access (e.g. on vacations), and then push at the end of the week. It’ll be the same as having pushed everyday during one week (this works with personal projects, be careful with projects where there are other contributors)

- Only contributions on 'master' are counted by GitHub, so if you use multiple branchs for new features / bug fixes, the contributions will count only when (and if) you’ll merge them into master

I'm glad someone can relate to that feeling of not wanting to work. The master branch thing was annoying as well especially if you work regularly on separate branches in larger projects.

Yes, exactly this. Every time I think I could work on my side branch it feels like this is not really "worth" it. Sucks.

Actually, it is not the master branch. It is the default branch. I have a repo with a gh-pages branch, this works as well.

This isn't really in the spirit of what you're trying to do, but you can set the --date of the commit, or even amend the commit after the fact if you haven't pushed.

You want to set both GIT_COMMITTER_DATE and GIT_AUTHOR_DATE when you git commit.

As far as I know contributions to master (or default) and gh-pages count.

And yet somehow we're still surprised when clueless managers try to measure productivity in lines of code or quality in test coverage percentage...

I don't see the comparison.

TFA isn't about a productivity metric, it's about establishing a habit. Everyone from Jerry Seinfeld to Anne Lamott to Pablo Picasso extoll the virtue of making a habit of doing some work--even sometimes crappy or merely symbolic work--every day. ("Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working")

But that said, it's not as if doing something every day is totally uncorrelated to productivity. Sure, it's a proxy metric at most, but doing something is eventually a prerequisite to productivity.

But then again, maybe I'm a "clueless manager" type because I'd also argue that test-coverage isn't totally unrelated to quality. It's also a proxy metric and one that's relatively easy to game, but come on, is there anything in software development you find measurable?

I had the same kind of motivations and had a 83 day long streak. Was finding it difficult to contribute a lot on weekends. One travel broke my streak and was happy for it. https://github.com/manojlds

Blogging on github ( octopress, Jekyll, static files etc ) is one of the easiest ways to contribute.

Btw, anyone with similar habit for consecutive days visited on stackoverflow? http://stackoverflow.com/users/526535/manojlds

This has little to do with GitHub itself - I'm surprised the term open-source is only mentioned once.

yeah. but I'm more suprised nobody noticed the 1337.

Really curious about what, if any, side effects you picked up. Getting a commit streak is cool, but did you learn anything about networking, or finding open source projects to create/contribute to? Something that you feel you'll be able to take with you into your work habit (aside from the awesome "learn how to habit").

Great post!

I did actually contribute to more open source projects that were not my own! This was because I had run out of my own ideas and wanted to keep making meaningful contributions. Some side-effects near the end were more negative than anything though, including a lack of motivation to do ANYTHING GitHub related. It was uncomfortable at some points because I felt I was being forced against my will to contribute.

Still haven't broken my 30 day streak record since the last time I wrote about it [0]. Bums me out.

0 - http://blog.chewxy.com/2013/06/25/dry-spell/

162 days here! Was about to write a blog post about it - but I still need to finish the vaporware blog engine I've been working on for the last five years :)

Keep going and report back! :)

If you ARE going to make pretty patterns on your Github contributions graph, make sure you view them with my "Conway's Game Of Life in Github Contributions Page" Chrome Plugin: https://github.com/mk270/life-contributions

173 days here: https://github.com/pkulchenko; haven't pushed today's changes yet...

I like the fact that sometimes you don't have time to start something complex, but find small improvements or documentation updates that can be made.

Mine was 126 days, and my story went almost exactly like this, down to the end: I just kinda... spaced out. Even in a month with something like 50,000 miles flown, committed every day. But at some point, it just didn't matter any more, and I slipped up.

I'm currently on day 211 mysef[1]. About 50 of those days were contributions made from my Nexus 4 (Connectbot, tmux, vim) while traveling without a laptop.

1: https://github.com/uggedal/

Hah, just did the same thing since last month. Only manage to have a 33-day long streak ( https://github.com/cheeaun/ ). Perhaps will do it again when I feel motivated :)

I've been doing the commit every day thing for a while. Not quite as long as the author, but it's still something.

https://github.com/zachlatta

http://song-of-github.herokuapp.com/?username=ryanseys

A song of GitHub for this user is quite interesting ;)

So what's exactly going to happen if you somehow break the chain?

You're all being gamed by a flashy calendar.

uow! I haven't even ever seen this streak thing (too busy commiting all the time). Mine is pretty big and I'm ashamed to make it public hehehe

Anyway, you MUST make commit an habit. If you're into gamification, force yourself to do that and you won't regret.

A really interesting experiment, and congrats for sticking to it for so long!

Thank you! I am glad you found it interesting, it was certainly a learning experience for me :)

I like the concept but like not having my laptop on my vacations more.

my current streak is 4 days :/

but i just recommitted a project that's been dormant for 10 months so maybe I can pick away at it and make it not suck by the end of the week.

Do commits to private repos count towards the streak?

They do for your own view, but the public will see a different number for your streak. My projects are all open-sourced so I did not have this issue.

Thanks, you've inspired me to give this a try and the inclusion of private repos will really help.

this could easily be automated to make sure you don't miss a day if you keep a commit buffer offline

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