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Comment by jamii | Hacker News Reader

This may have helped - https://github.com/codeforamerica/follow-all/commits?author=...

I hate the implication that busywork is somehow less valuable than other kinds of work. Much of software development isn't intellectually rigorous. Many deficiencies in OSS could be resolved by people willing to do the same kind of gruntwork that you linked to here. I see this and think major props to @sferik for working hard to maintain public code, even when it's not glamorous.

I agree, actually. My comment was a pedantic correction and added nothing useful to the conversation. Props to sferik for the hard work.

I'm not familiar with this developer or that project, but what I inferred is that perhaps he deliberately spread out these relatively minor commits in order to keep his streak going. Of course, I have no idea if that's true. Busy work can be valuable, but purposefully spreading out minor commits makes the streak statistic less impressive (especially considering how easy it would be to automate).

That’s just one project. For a better representation of my overall activity, see https://github.com/sferik?tab=activity.

The point is that removing some of the "bumped a Gemfile.lock" commits, you'd not have the streak you have:

https://github.com/sferik?tab=contributions&from=2014-02-18

You certainly work on tons of great open source stuff, and I don't want to diminish the value of that at all, but for somebody else to hold up your streak as a shining example of the commit-every-day mindset is a bit in the grey area, as far as I'm concerned.

Bollocks. Busy-work needs to be done, end of story.

Hell, nearly all my commits to FOSS are just that: the crappy busywork no-one wants to do. And a bug-fix here and there.

I've not seen anybody disagree with that. But running `bundle update && git commit -a && git push` falls into what I, for myself, consider a grey area on the "I've committed today" scale. I say this as someone who also tries to maintain a GitHub streak.

You, and sferik, and each other GitHub user is totally free to disagree. I don't own the streak system.

It's gotta be done and someone has to do it. Whether it counts as coding or not, it's still a process that someone has to focus on and take time out of their day to complete.

Wait, is he just changing version numbers? Suddenly he goes from most committed programmer ever to most...frivolous?

If this is "frivolous" then I sure wish I were a more frivolous coder. Someone has to do the "frivolous" work of keeping up to date on security patches so our apps are locked down. Someone has to make "frivolous" corrections of bad indentation so code is more readable for the rest of us. Someone has to write all those "frivolous" READMEs so people like me can get up and running.

Thank goodness for frivolous work like this.

> Someone has to do the "frivolous" work

Ahem... robots?

It shouldn't require any human intervention to watch for changes and bump a version number. In fact, I guess, it didn't. Personally, I'd tolerate repetitive work for several days, maybe even a week, then I'd certainly hack a script and after several days of observation return only on script's "hey, I'm confused, please help me" notification.

3 great virtues of a programmer:

- laziness - impatience - hubris

Well, that could be the case, but they might also be testing the versions before updating them in the published gemfiles.

It's still busywork, but that would at least be legitimate. :)

Running the tests should still be completely automatable.

If there are no tests and he tests manually, then there's some commits waiting that will improve the project. :-)

The bar is pretty damn high to get some respect on HN.

Yes. And if that moves something forward - good!

For me this gamification works. Yes I do commits I feel more proud of than others. Yes, I 'cheat' and create tons of projects which makes it easy to find stuff to commit. And yes, keeping the streak might become the thing.

The point is that it (for me) Github streak has made me much more productive and due to continious practice, better and more accomplished as a developer. I _do_ stuff more than ever and only wish I had been doing it more years ago.

Yay for (coding)streaks!

And anybody reaching 100+ is a hero in my book. (My records is 68 days but it is going DOWN this month.)

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