Dear Github, can I go home now? | Hacker News Reader

Dear Github, can I go home now?

github.com

25 pointslucasnemeth8 comments

Looks like he's just trying to shed some light on how bogus those activity graphs are (and also illustrating how easy it is to game them). The GitHub contributions graph probably shouldn't be used for any sort of meaningful measurement of skill, open source involvement, job candidacy—or anything else really. I found the two related articles linked in the readme really interesting:

http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-an...

https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-c...

(Still reading the first one.)

Before I checked what it was, I checked the profile of the person behind it and saw that he had contributed to open source code for more than a year. I thought that was very cool and noble and continued to read the readme of the repository and found out that everything about the person's history is fake

So if your purpose was to make people believe that you're a good contributor and then realise you're just a liar who fake his contributions, you've done the right thing!

Well, I thought he was just pointing to the fact that the profile page on Github isn't very informative. It's too focused on "how frequently do you commit". And that using this as a CV is a bad thing.

I don't think that using Github as a portfolio is necessarily bad, I don't think it should be the only requisite for a job, but I like the ideia. The problem is, that wasn't the original intention of Github, and today it's profile page reinforce the wrong things.

I think he just tried to show that by hacking his own profile, but it could trick some people if he didn't had explained.

This is his point though. People use the github activity chart to inaccurately infer activity, which is dangerous as Github rises in importance.

People whose opinions of you really matter know that the green boxes don't.

As much as I hate gamification, I feel like it's probably been used for worse things...

so... you want customizable metrics/views for your github page?

how far til this becomes `myspace for code`?

Indeed, github is hamster wheeling people.

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