100 Days of GitHub Contributions

Alternative lesson: UI design matters. Github is achieving what they want (increased participation) by stimulating daily activity through an activity graph. Example: this article, John Resig (https://github.com/jeresig), etc.

100 days is probably a pretty good limit, it starts to lose effectiveness past that. Last year I did 234 days straight, only ending the streak on my wedding day, but it should have ended much sooner. It was ultra-productive for the first 60-70% of the days, but the focus started shifting from being productive to keeping the streak alive. It ultimately became counter-productive after going for so long. Sounds great in theory, but make sure you give yourself a hard limit.

Interesting. I saw one other post few days back(don't have link handy). OP had contributed for 100 days. Question to you(and others) How do you select projects for that?

Ever since I read John Resig's code every day article[1], I've started keeping track of my "streak" with a calendar next to my desk[2]. I've made substantial progress on my soon-to-be released personal project because of this. I don't know how long this will last, but it definitely keeps my project fresh in my mind all day, every day. Even if I only do a little bit of work, it's much, much better than waiting until a weekend and not feeling motivated because I have a huge pile of things to do. I use a Trello board to break down things into simple "tasks", so I try to take down at least one or two of those a day.

[1] http://ejohn.org/blog/write-code-every-day/ [2] http://instagram.com/p/ngoaRQg0Fq/

I am also on a similar path (87 days atm). I have noticed a couple of things that forces its way into a state of mind:

- I have started to always open source everything I do. It's the same as the gameification aspect, I just need to get another spot on that graph.

- I immidiately try to fix/report issues I encounter with other projects, even if they are minor (instead of just being a little annoyed about it). Also, opening issues counts towards the streak!

- I force myself to learn new things, all the time. Finished with a small project? Time to learn a new language and push the project to github.

So I'll recommend the "code every day" or "100 days of github" to anyone interested in learning new things or contributing more back to open source.

I stopped messing with the contributions after it became clear how arbitrary and frustrating the feature can be. Not only does it still struggle with time zones and branches, when you leave an organization or otherwise lose access to a private repository, all of those contributions disappear from your graph. I have found the concept to work better for me by tracking my streaks using other tools like Habit RPG.