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More contributions on your profile

240 points by cheshire137 10y ago

randomstring 10y ago
I like the change. I keep all my online coursework (Coursera and the like) in Github. This is code and work that cannot be public because it would violate the class code of conduct. It always made me a little sad to see big barren streaks in my contribution graph. Especially when I knew I had been coding more than usual and working on really interesting stuff.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Never thought of this use case! Sounds like GitHub did the right thing.
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  Why does anyone pay for private github repos when they're free on bitbucket?
  - ewoodrich 10y ago
    Students can obtain unlimited private GitHub repos for free via the GitHub Student Pack: https://education.github.com/pack https://education.github.com/pack
    - nv-vn 10y ago
      Shitty as a high-school student at a school that doesn't have official student emails since they'll just immediately reject my application for the student pack :(
      - jimmaswell 10y ago
        Having to apply for it still sounds a lot less convenient than just using bitbucket where it's free to begin with. What does github offer better besides brand recognition?
        Jach 10y ago
        UI.
        jimmaswell 10y ago
        I've used both and the only one I'd complain about is GitHub, especially their terrible desktop client.
      - prashnts 10y ago
        Not necessarily. I know a few people who had emailed their ID cards (which had validity) as a proof for student status because they didn't have a student email. You could give it a shot.
    - Jach 10y ago
      They take this away after 2 years. Bitbucket gives students an Ultimate account for free, forever.
  - ssalazar 10y ago
    I dont pay for private GitHub repos but I do prefer their UI over Bitbucket's.
  - cyphar 10y ago
    Or they could use GitLab which is free software (the community edition). And you can also make private repos without fee as well.
minimaxir 10y ago
I was about to say "if private repo contributions count toward the code streaks, then someone could write a commit-bot to artificially inflate their code streak completely undetected." But the code streak is being removed too, which conveniently makes this potential loophole a nonissue! (However, it wouldn't surprise me if commit bots are used regardless to give an impression of coding-every-day on the graph.)
- nandhp 10y ago
  There are also commit bots for other contribution graph hacks: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
  - Rmilb 10y ago
    This one will also adds instant C++ history to make you a "Rock Star" C++ programmer. https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar
    - avinassh 10y ago
      ha ha thanks for the mention, I am the author of that tool (:
- sytse 10y ago
  Is there a risk that people still want a very green profile? With private repos you can use a commit bot without getting caught. I think public information should be based on public commits.
  - newjersey 10y ago
    I have a public repo that has bogus commits to make my profile green. The repo is even very helpfully named if you take the two seconds dsto look at just the name. But as others have pointed out, Dropbox wants people to have private repos. Bizdev wins I guess.
  - 10y ago
fuzionmonkey 10y ago
I actually don't like this change. Private contributions don't benefit the greater community unless the project is eventually open sourced. The contribution graph was a nice way to show off how much one contributes to open source, thereby encouraging folks to contribute to open source projects. It's a vanity metric in the first place, so why not use it to help motivate more contributions to open source software?
- karim 10y ago
  Because Github has a different incentive: they want as many hobbyist developers as possible using private repos.
  - sdesol 10y ago
    They are definitely working on strengthening their value proposition for paying customers. And I really can't blame them, as they are competing against free. GitLab is free. Bitbucket and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Service (VSS) are free for 5 or less users. What they (GitHub) really need to work on, if it isn't on their radar is a marketplace/extension system. And this is where I think Microsoft may leap frog everybody. I've only spent a day looking at building extensions for VSS, but I'm really impressed by how much thought they put into making 3rd party solutions, first class citizens. And I think this comes from the fact they understand enterprise. In enterprise, there are so many crazy edge cases and if you don't have a reasonable answer to how you can address them, customers will pass on you.
    - moby 10y ago
      We released this last October as a way of broadcasting the work we've been doing in the ecosystem thus far: https://github.com/integrations https://github.com/integrations. There's lots more to be done in that area, and we're learning a ton from our integration partners along the way. Enterprise readiness is one of the big areas we want to keep refining too.
      - sdesol 10y ago
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
I'm going to miss streaks. I don't think it's important that you could technically abuse them with an auto-committer, but it's not like streaks are competetive or anything. They're just a tool to encourage you to contribute to FOSS every day. (rewrote this comment to provide more substance)
- hk__2 10y ago
  > They're just a tool to encourage you to contribute to FOSS every day. The “every day” is a problem. Contributing to FOSS is a good thing, but encouraging people to write code every single day can lead to unhealthy habits. > but it's not like streaks are competetive or anything There are, just like your number of commits or your number of followers.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    I don't think people's unhealthy behaviors are my problem. As someone who doesn't code for my job, having this helped keep me motivated for hobby programming. And I don't think it's inherently "unhealthy" to write code on a weekend. Coding can be fun, and done for enjoyment.
  - nv-vn 10y ago
    Writing code every day doesn't necessarily mean doing more than a few short lines. I like to think of it as a mental exercise, like how solving puzzles every day helps you think better. Also, there are days where I have kept a streak just by documenting something or writing up issues of a repository, which are things that don't involve programming but are still useful skill related to programming (and are much more relaxed than havong to write 100 lines of code for some project).
- trishume 10y ago
  Agreed. The presence of a streak counter on Github did more for my productivity than any other feature or factor. They're a tremendously powerful self-motivation tool. Whenever I'm not on a streak I always find some excuse to sit around and do nothing instead of working on a cool project. A huge portion of all the open source work I've ever done has been because I didn't want to break a Github streak. You could argue that I can always track my streak myself, but the fact that it was a public metric with visible milestones (e.g 100 days) matters. Even though it's a somewhat meaningless vanity metric, I know people will notice it, and people will notice if I miss a day and break it. I don't mind the private repos change as much, but it could do with showing private contributions in a different colour (or maybe a diagonal slice of the box). With private contributions the boxes lose some meaning because now all it tells you is "does this person's employer use Github" rather than showing how much open source work they do.
Ruud-v-A 10y ago
It is good to see the streak go. To quote Jeff Atwood, “If I have learned anything from the Internet, it is this: be very, very careful when you put a number next to someone's name. Because people will do whatever it takes to make that number go up.” I hope this move helps focussing a bit more on quality over quantity. https://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental-2/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental...
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  I am pretty sad about this, because this is gone due to people getting butthurt about other's contribution numbers or some sort of comparison, rather than what it was good for: A self-motivating tool. The notion of "cheating" the contribution graph is senseless, because it's not a competition. However, what it was great for was motivation to yourself to write code (however minor) every day. I used the streak count to help push myself to keep working on a project I would've otherwise quickly set aside. My last streak was 27 days. I found when I broke a streak, my motivation to commit was much lower, and I would let my project lie for several days at a time.
  - gradys 10y ago
    I'm with you. I liked the steak count as a source of personal motivation, but we still have that don't we? Now you need to look at the squares, but an unbroken sequence of colored squares is just as motivating as a number, isn't it?
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      Then why remove the numbers? Counting squares is a pain. They should at least let you see these numbers on your own profile. Mind you, someone could easily make a browser extension to do this, basically.
      - nv-vn 10y ago
        The problem with a browser extension is that it wouldn't count commits past 365 days. Would be better to leave the feature in and have a browser extension to opt out of it.
zuck9 10y ago
I love the pace of changes at GitHub after the "Dear GitHub" letter, it feels like they woke up from years-long hibernation.
- bad_user 10y ago
  Did they address anything in that letter?
  - zuck9 10y ago
    Yep, all the three major issues have been mostly addressed: https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github
    - cyphar 10y ago
      Have they addressed not being able to add custom text when someone goes to the new issue tab?
      - rndstr 10y ago
        If you are talking about templates, then yes: https://github.com/blog/2111-issue-and-pull-request-templates https://github.com/blog/2111-issue-and-pull-request-template...
        cyphar 10y ago
        I wasn't. The third thing in the "Dear GitHub" letter was that people wanted to make the "Please check the CONTRIBUTING.md" customisable.
thruflo 10y ago
You have to logout to see how others see your profile. Toggling the 'contributions settings' to 'public only' on my profile still shows me all my private contributions.
- hesselink 10y ago
  You can also open a private browsing window.
danso 10y ago
Poor John Resig!...IIRC, his streak goes back 3+ years https://github.com/jeresig https://github.com/jeresig
- sotojuan 10y ago
  He doesn't seem to mind! https://twitter.com/jeresig/status/733413302982877185 https://twitter.com/jeresig/status/733413302982877185
_RPM 10y ago
I wish it would show contributions to branches other than master.
- frandroid 10y ago
  Your contributions will eventually be counted when your branch is merged to master.
rexf 10y ago
This is a nice change. If you care, you can avoid areas of emptiness from your profile by adding your private repo commits. One thing this doesn't address (and I assume GH would never allow) is commits from other sources, like BitBucket, GitLab, etc.
- SEMW 10y ago
  > One thing this doesn't address (and I assume GH would never allow) is commits from other sources, like BitBucket, GitLab, etc. Huh? A git commit is a git commit, doesn't matter whether it was made with the git cli, github (ie libgit2), or any other tool. Commits don't store what tool was used to make them.
  - keyanp 10y ago
    > Huh? A git commit is a git commit I believe the parent post is referring to commits made to a repo that isn't being hosted on GitHub. One workaround could be to host your fork on GitHub and even though the origin may be on a different hosting service.
pred_ 10y ago
I wish it was possible to turn off the graph entirely; I don't see why I would want to make it so completely obvious when I'm on holidays or for one reason or another not working on GitHub based repos.
hueving 10y ago
This is stupid. They might as well let users define which squares they want filled with a config file. Before this I could determine what kind of open source work someone did by looking at this graph and clicking on random days of activity to see details. Now the "everyone is equally awesome and meritocracy is a swear word" attitude has eliminated the last of the usefulness of this particular feature.
- knz 10y ago
  Couldn't they solve this by just having a drop down to toggle display of public or private commits?
- josteink 10y ago
  > Now the "everyone is equally awesome and meritocracy is a swear word" I think you mean everyone except those who point out how that completely doesn't work in the real world. Those people get down-voted to the abyss ;)
robbiemitchell 10y ago
This is great for people applying for a new job. So much activity happens in private repos that it can look like you aren't that active at all. (Not that showing off activity is necessary or sufficient, but it's still nice. Recruiters and hiring managers do look.)
taurath 10y ago
I really really like this change - just general proof even if weak as hell that I've been constantly working and coding is a big deal if I don't have a ton of personal projects.
steveklabnik 10y ago
I'm really glad to see this change, for similar reasons expressed elsewhere in this thread. Next up, GitHub, is doing a better job of determining what is a "contribution". Specifically, issue triage doesn't count as contribution. If I open an issue, I get a contribution, but if I close an issue, I don't. I do a lot of issue triage, and the lack of symmetry always bugged me: if someone opens up an invalid bug report, and I do the triage work, determine that bug was already fixed on master, and close it, they get a contribution, but I don't! In other words, once you start quantifying what is and isn't a contribution, you also start to quantify what kind of labor is valued and not valued. I'd like to see some kind of revision to these rules that makes sure people who do valuable work are getting recognized for it.
akerl_ 10y ago
As somebody who enjoyed having the streak to self-motivate, I started reading this post super-excited: a common complaint I've heard about streaks was the requirement to open-source, and I know lots of people who like to code but wanted the freedom to experiment without their code being scrutinized. Then I got to the loss of the commit streak counter. The main impact there is that it's now not reasonably possible for me to track my streak anymore, since GitHub only serves up 366 squares. So what they've effectively done for me is remove that little bit of excitement that can help motivate me to improve my skills when I'd otherwise slack off. I'm going to see what I need to do to get the calculation for longer streaks, but it seems likely it'll have to be something custom that relies on my local filesystem for git data, which is annoying.
- Scea91 10y ago
  You are not taking a single day off in a year?
  - mcbits 10y ago
    I've brushed my teeth every single day for almost a year now. Maybe it's time for a day off before I get burned out on toothbrushing? If someone sees coding a bit every day as a healthy habit, a great way to start the day, I'm not sure why there should be anything wrong with never taking a day off from it.
  - akerl_ 10y ago
    I've written code every day for the past 997 days. Which is now going to be much more work to keep track of, courtesy of this change :) I'll likely be working this weekend on something that polls github for each day moving backwards, or modifying a friend's code that parses local repo metadata.
swalsh 10y ago
The private repository visibility is great. Not showing streak count though super sucks, I'm midway on my best personal streak I've ever had. It may not be much to some people, but to me making progress on my personal project 67 days in a row was a huge motivator. On days when things aren't going great, I still try to do some work because heck I'm not going to end a 67-day streak just because I had a bad day.
andy_ppp 10y ago
Hmmm. This does not help those of us doing work on code hosted in places other than GitHub and entrenches their position as the default system for managing software. It's tempting to game the system as well, setting up a private repo that I can commit to automatically every day. I don't think either of these things are positive!
whatever_dude 10y ago
To me, this is good news. It's a small, tiny, stupid thing, but I have several personal projects that I maintain as my own private repos and not seeing them counted there always felt a little wrong. The number of contributions in my chart just increased 20-fold.
dc2 10y ago
Is it me, or is the newly moved contributions text 1 pixel too high?
briansteffens 10y ago
Maybe they could bring back streaks but make them only visible to yourself as a purely motivational thing?
p4wnc6 10y ago
I'm sad they still don't provide an option to hide all contributions. There is a huge difference between presenting all contributions in an immediately visible chart smack on someone's landing page vs. tacitly allowing the "same data" to be public but requiring people to do a lot of work to actually track down a given user's public contributions if they are so interested. I don't mind really if someone wants to do that work. If third party sites pop up that do that work and turn it into visualizations, that's OK too, because you can always dispute the accuracy or intentions of third parties. But I am not OK with my contributions being extremely easy to visualize just by looking at the landing page of my profile. I've had several recruiters and interviewers comment on it, and ask me antagonistic and probing questions about my commit history to a particular side project repo that I just have for fun. Even when I explain that I've had significant family issues in the past year or so which has greatly impacted my ability to do as much OSS development as I want, they never seem satisfied. It just gives them an extra lever to use to reject someone for political bullshit reasons. Since this is common from recruiters and employers, it's only fair, in my view, that they should have to really work a lot harder to aggregate that data themselves. Or at least allow me to control whether or not my own user landing page does or doesn't present that data directly. Hilariously, at the bottom of the page GitHub says you can send them feedback by notifying @github on Twitter ... except I don't have or want a Twitter account ... so I can't even provide feedback.
esaym 10y ago
Did they ever start showing contributions to commits to forks? If I remember correctly, they only only counted stuff you had direct access/commit bits to, which I found annoying...
- prashnts 10y ago
  If you open a pull request to the base repo and it gets accepted, then it shows in the history.
jbpetersen 10y ago
And here I was hoping to see gists count towards streaks...
sabertazimi 10y ago
Oops,I have to break my code streaks up.It make me realize that quality is important, not quantity.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dvcrn 10y ago
I am happy and sad about this. I am happy because it means that the contribution graph looses it's importance. I could just use a cron script that auto commits 1-3 commits every day and noone could verify the importance of these commits. This is good because many people just got into the habit of updating their dotfiles once a day or do some very very insignificant things to keep the streak going. On the other side it's sad because the graph only showed involvement with open source. Private repositories shouldn't be in there to taint the image. I hope that with this people stop with artificial streak pushing and actually show their open source contributions only.
cyphar 10y ago
I think that the fact that GitHub doesn't count pushing to non-master branches as "contributing to free software" is quite silly. If I do a lot of work on a feature branch and it isn't merged, it doesn't count as "work". Not that I really care about imaginary green internet squares.
petetnt 10y ago
I think this is a great change. I don't go after internet points myself, but I think the graph has various other benefits than just showing how many times one can do a git commit in an hour. For example if I am sending an issue or a PR to an repo maintained by a single person, I can do some preliminary judging of response times and how likely is the change going to land by just from seeing the graph. Obviously private repos skewed this a lot: some people seem to have disappeared from the end of the earth, but in reality they might just be busy working on something else, privately. In general, the graph also works as personal log across ALL of my projects: everything I do is in GitHub, and I can easily see what kind of projects I have worked on in the past year and analyse my progress across all the projects I contribute to. I think it's a great tool with tons of benefits.
hiby007 10y ago
>Now that every paid plan includes unlimited private repositories, you can experiment all you want in private and still add to your contribution graph. For more information, read our help guide for toggling private contributions on your profile. I think this can also be used to show fake contribution within private repos with a bot like these https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti it becomes easy to show more activity without doing much work.
josteink 10y ago
With this change, I guess github has changed from being about open source to being about enterprise customers. Which is fine for a company which is about making money. That said, I think it's sad. It's a shame, but I guess that's just another signal that open source projects should find another home more fitting to their ideals (like gitlab).
detailyang 10y ago
so sad, cannot get 'long streak' :(

240 points by cheshire137 10y ago

I like the change. I keep all my online coursework (Coursera and the like) in Github. This is code and work that cannot be public because it would violate the class code of conduct. It always made me a little sad to see big barren streaks in my contribution graph. Especially when I knew I had been coding more than usual and working on really interesting stuff.

sotojuan 10y ago
Never thought of this use case! Sounds like GitHub did the right thing.
jimmaswell 10y ago
Why does anyone pay for private github repos when they're free on bitbucket?
- ewoodrich 10y ago
  Students can obtain unlimited private GitHub repos for free via the GitHub Student Pack: https://education.github.com/pack https://education.github.com/pack
  - nv-vn 10y ago
    Shitty as a high-school student at a school that doesn't have official student emails since they'll just immediately reject my application for the student pack :(
    - jimmaswell 10y ago
      Having to apply for it still sounds a lot less convenient than just using bitbucket where it's free to begin with. What does github offer better besides brand recognition?
      - Jach 10y ago
        UI.
        jimmaswell 10y ago
        I've used both and the only one I'd complain about is GitHub, especially their terrible desktop client.
    - prashnts 10y ago
      Not necessarily. I know a few people who had emailed their ID cards (which had validity) as a proof for student status because they didn't have a student email. You could give it a shot.
  - Jach 10y ago
    They take this away after 2 years. Bitbucket gives students an Ultimate account for free, forever.
- ssalazar 10y ago
  I dont pay for private GitHub repos but I do prefer their UI over Bitbucket's.
- cyphar 10y ago
  Or they could use GitLab which is free software (the community edition). And you can also make private repos without fee as well.

minimaxir 10y ago

I was about to say "if private repo contributions count toward the code streaks, then someone could write a commit-bot to artificially inflate their code streak completely undetected." But the code streak is being removed too, which conveniently makes this potential loophole a nonissue! (However, it wouldn't surprise me if commit bots are used regardless to give an impression of coding-every-day on the graph.)

nandhp 10y ago
There are also commit bots for other contribution graph hacks: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
- Rmilb 10y ago
  This one will also adds instant C++ history to make you a "Rock Star" C++ programmer. https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar
  - avinassh 10y ago
    ha ha thanks for the mention, I am the author of that tool (:
sytse 10y ago
Is there a risk that people still want a very green profile? With private repos you can use a commit bot without getting caught. I think public information should be based on public commits.
- newjersey 10y ago
  I have a public repo that has bogus commits to make my profile green. The repo is even very helpfully named if you take the two seconds dsto look at just the name. But as others have pointed out, Dropbox wants people to have private repos. Bizdev wins I guess.
- 10y ago

fuzionmonkey 10y ago

I actually don't like this change. Private contributions don't benefit the greater community unless the project is eventually open sourced. The contribution graph was a nice way to show off how much one contributes to open source, thereby encouraging folks to contribute to open source projects. It's a vanity metric in the first place, so why not use it to help motivate more contributions to open source software?

karim 10y ago
Because Github has a different incentive: they want as many hobbyist developers as possible using private repos.
- sdesol 10y ago
  They are definitely working on strengthening their value proposition for paying customers. And I really can't blame them, as they are competing against free. GitLab is free. Bitbucket and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Service (VSS) are free for 5 or less users. What they (GitHub) really need to work on, if it isn't on their radar is a marketplace/extension system. And this is where I think Microsoft may leap frog everybody. I've only spent a day looking at building extensions for VSS, but I'm really impressed by how much thought they put into making 3rd party solutions, first class citizens. And I think this comes from the fact they understand enterprise. In enterprise, there are so many crazy edge cases and if you don't have a reasonable answer to how you can address them, customers will pass on you.
  - moby 10y ago
    We released this last October as a way of broadcasting the work we've been doing in the ecosystem thus far: https://github.com/integrations https://github.com/integrations. There's lots more to be done in that area, and we're learning a ton from our integration partners along the way. Enterprise readiness is one of the big areas we want to keep refining too.
    - sdesol 10y ago

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago

I'm going to miss streaks. I don't think it's important that you could technically abuse them with an auto-committer, but it's not like streaks are competetive or anything. They're just a tool to encourage you to contribute to FOSS every day. (rewrote this comment to provide more substance)

hk__2 10y ago
> They're just a tool to encourage you to contribute to FOSS every day. The “every day” is a problem. Contributing to FOSS is a good thing, but encouraging people to write code every single day can lead to unhealthy habits. > but it's not like streaks are competetive or anything There are, just like your number of commits or your number of followers.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  I don't think people's unhealthy behaviors are my problem. As someone who doesn't code for my job, having this helped keep me motivated for hobby programming. And I don't think it's inherently "unhealthy" to write code on a weekend. Coding can be fun, and done for enjoyment.
- nv-vn 10y ago
  Writing code every day doesn't necessarily mean doing more than a few short lines. I like to think of it as a mental exercise, like how solving puzzles every day helps you think better. Also, there are days where I have kept a streak just by documenting something or writing up issues of a repository, which are things that don't involve programming but are still useful skill related to programming (and are much more relaxed than havong to write 100 lines of code for some project).
trishume 10y ago
Agreed. The presence of a streak counter on Github did more for my productivity than any other feature or factor. They're a tremendously powerful self-motivation tool. Whenever I'm not on a streak I always find some excuse to sit around and do nothing instead of working on a cool project. A huge portion of all the open source work I've ever done has been because I didn't want to break a Github streak. You could argue that I can always track my streak myself, but the fact that it was a public metric with visible milestones (e.g 100 days) matters. Even though it's a somewhat meaningless vanity metric, I know people will notice it, and people will notice if I miss a day and break it. I don't mind the private repos change as much, but it could do with showing private contributions in a different colour (or maybe a diagonal slice of the box). With private contributions the boxes lose some meaning because now all it tells you is "does this person's employer use Github" rather than showing how much open source work they do.

Ruud-v-A 10y ago

It is good to see the streak go. To quote Jeff Atwood, “If I have learned anything from the Internet, it is this: be very, very careful when you put a number next to someone's name. Because people will do whatever it takes to make that number go up.” I hope this move helps focussing a bit more on quality over quantity. https://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental-2/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental...

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
I am pretty sad about this, because this is gone due to people getting butthurt about other's contribution numbers or some sort of comparison, rather than what it was good for: A self-motivating tool. The notion of "cheating" the contribution graph is senseless, because it's not a competition. However, what it was great for was motivation to yourself to write code (however minor) every day. I used the streak count to help push myself to keep working on a project I would've otherwise quickly set aside. My last streak was 27 days. I found when I broke a streak, my motivation to commit was much lower, and I would let my project lie for several days at a time.
- gradys 10y ago
  I'm with you. I liked the steak count as a source of personal motivation, but we still have that don't we? Now you need to look at the squares, but an unbroken sequence of colored squares is just as motivating as a number, isn't it?
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Then why remove the numbers? Counting squares is a pain. They should at least let you see these numbers on your own profile. Mind you, someone could easily make a browser extension to do this, basically.
    - nv-vn 10y ago
      The problem with a browser extension is that it wouldn't count commits past 365 days. Would be better to leave the feature in and have a browser extension to opt out of it.

zuck9 10y ago

I love the pace of changes at GitHub after the "Dear GitHub" letter, it feels like they woke up from years-long hibernation.

bad_user 10y ago
Did they address anything in that letter?
- zuck9 10y ago
  Yep, all the three major issues have been mostly addressed: https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github
  - cyphar 10y ago
    Have they addressed not being able to add custom text when someone goes to the new issue tab?
    - rndstr 10y ago
      If you are talking about templates, then yes: https://github.com/blog/2111-issue-and-pull-request-templates https://github.com/blog/2111-issue-and-pull-request-template...
      - cyphar 10y ago
        I wasn't. The third thing in the "Dear GitHub" letter was that people wanted to make the "Please check the CONTRIBUTING.md" customisable.

thruflo 10y ago

You have to logout to see how others see your profile. Toggling the 'contributions settings' to 'public only' on my profile still shows me all my private contributions.

hesselink 10y ago
You can also open a private browsing window.

danso 10y ago

Poor John Resig!...IIRC, his streak goes back 3+ years https://github.com/jeresig https://github.com/jeresig

sotojuan 10y ago
He doesn't seem to mind! https://twitter.com/jeresig/status/733413302982877185 https://twitter.com/jeresig/status/733413302982877185

_RPM 10y ago

I wish it would show contributions to branches other than master.

frandroid 10y ago
Your contributions will eventually be counted when your branch is merged to master.

rexf 10y ago

This is a nice change. If you care, you can avoid areas of emptiness from your profile by adding your private repo commits. One thing this doesn't address (and I assume GH would never allow) is commits from other sources, like BitBucket, GitLab, etc.

SEMW 10y ago
> One thing this doesn't address (and I assume GH would never allow) is commits from other sources, like BitBucket, GitLab, etc. Huh? A git commit is a git commit, doesn't matter whether it was made with the git cli, github (ie libgit2), or any other tool. Commits don't store what tool was used to make them.
- keyanp 10y ago
  > Huh? A git commit is a git commit I believe the parent post is referring to commits made to a repo that isn't being hosted on GitHub. One workaround could be to host your fork on GitHub and even though the origin may be on a different hosting service.

pred_ 10y ago

I wish it was possible to turn off the graph entirely; I don't see why I would want to make it so completely obvious when I'm on holidays or for one reason or another not working on GitHub based repos.

hueving 10y ago

This is stupid. They might as well let users define which squares they want filled with a config file. Before this I could determine what kind of open source work someone did by looking at this graph and clicking on random days of activity to see details. Now the "everyone is equally awesome and meritocracy is a swear word" attitude has eliminated the last of the usefulness of this particular feature.

knz 10y ago
Couldn't they solve this by just having a drop down to toggle display of public or private commits?
josteink 10y ago
> Now the "everyone is equally awesome and meritocracy is a swear word" I think you mean everyone except those who point out how that completely doesn't work in the real world. Those people get down-voted to the abyss ;)

robbiemitchell 10y ago

This is great for people applying for a new job. So much activity happens in private repos that it can look like you aren't that active at all. (Not that showing off activity is necessary or sufficient, but it's still nice. Recruiters and hiring managers do look.)

taurath 10y ago

I really really like this change - just general proof even if weak as hell that I've been constantly working and coding is a big deal if I don't have a ton of personal projects.

steveklabnik 10y ago

I'm really glad to see this change, for similar reasons expressed elsewhere in this thread. Next up, GitHub, is doing a better job of determining what is a "contribution". Specifically, issue triage doesn't count as contribution. If I open an issue, I get a contribution, but if I close an issue, I don't. I do a lot of issue triage, and the lack of symmetry always bugged me: if someone opens up an invalid bug report, and I do the triage work, determine that bug was already fixed on master, and close it, they get a contribution, but I don't! In other words, once you start quantifying what is and isn't a contribution, you also start to quantify what kind of labor is valued and not valued. I'd like to see some kind of revision to these rules that makes sure people who do valuable work are getting recognized for it.

akerl_ 10y ago

As somebody who enjoyed having the streak to self-motivate, I started reading this post super-excited: a common complaint I've heard about streaks was the requirement to open-source, and I know lots of people who like to code but wanted the freedom to experiment without their code being scrutinized. Then I got to the loss of the commit streak counter. The main impact there is that it's now not reasonably possible for me to track my streak anymore, since GitHub only serves up 366 squares. So what they've effectively done for me is remove that little bit of excitement that can help motivate me to improve my skills when I'd otherwise slack off. I'm going to see what I need to do to get the calculation for longer streaks, but it seems likely it'll have to be something custom that relies on my local filesystem for git data, which is annoying.

Scea91 10y ago
You are not taking a single day off in a year?
- mcbits 10y ago
  I've brushed my teeth every single day for almost a year now. Maybe it's time for a day off before I get burned out on toothbrushing? If someone sees coding a bit every day as a healthy habit, a great way to start the day, I'm not sure why there should be anything wrong with never taking a day off from it.
- akerl_ 10y ago
  I've written code every day for the past 997 days. Which is now going to be much more work to keep track of, courtesy of this change :) I'll likely be working this weekend on something that polls github for each day moving backwards, or modifying a friend's code that parses local repo metadata.

swalsh 10y ago

The private repository visibility is great. Not showing streak count though super sucks, I'm midway on my best personal streak I've ever had. It may not be much to some people, but to me making progress on my personal project 67 days in a row was a huge motivator. On days when things aren't going great, I still try to do some work because heck I'm not going to end a 67-day streak just because I had a bad day.

andy_ppp 10y ago

Hmmm. This does not help those of us doing work on code hosted in places other than GitHub and entrenches their position as the default system for managing software. It's tempting to game the system as well, setting up a private repo that I can commit to automatically every day. I don't think either of these things are positive!

whatever_dude 10y ago

To me, this is good news. It's a small, tiny, stupid thing, but I have several personal projects that I maintain as my own private repos and not seeing them counted there always felt a little wrong. The number of contributions in my chart just increased 20-fold.

dc2 10y ago

Is it me, or is the newly moved contributions text 1 pixel too high?

briansteffens 10y ago

Maybe they could bring back streaks but make them only visible to yourself as a purely motivational thing?

p4wnc6 10y ago

I'm sad they still don't provide an option to hide all contributions. There is a huge difference between presenting all contributions in an immediately visible chart smack on someone's landing page vs. tacitly allowing the "same data" to be public but requiring people to do a lot of work to actually track down a given user's public contributions if they are so interested. I don't mind really if someone wants to do that work. If third party sites pop up that do that work and turn it into visualizations, that's OK too, because you can always dispute the accuracy or intentions of third parties. But I am not OK with my contributions being extremely easy to visualize just by looking at the landing page of my profile. I've had several recruiters and interviewers comment on it, and ask me antagonistic and probing questions about my commit history to a particular side project repo that I just have for fun. Even when I explain that I've had significant family issues in the past year or so which has greatly impacted my ability to do as much OSS development as I want, they never seem satisfied. It just gives them an extra lever to use to reject someone for political bullshit reasons. Since this is common from recruiters and employers, it's only fair, in my view, that they should have to really work a lot harder to aggregate that data themselves. Or at least allow me to control whether or not my own user landing page does or doesn't present that data directly. Hilariously, at the bottom of the page GitHub says you can send them feedback by notifying @github on Twitter ... except I don't have or want a Twitter account ... so I can't even provide feedback.

esaym 10y ago

Did they ever start showing contributions to commits to forks? If I remember correctly, they only only counted stuff you had direct access/commit bits to, which I found annoying...

prashnts 10y ago
If you open a pull request to the base repo and it gets accepted, then it shows in the history.

jbpetersen 10y ago

And here I was hoping to see gists count towards streaks...

sabertazimi 10y ago

Oops,I have to break my code streaks up.It make me realize that quality is important, not quantity.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dvcrn 10y ago

I am happy and sad about this. I am happy because it means that the contribution graph looses it's importance. I could just use a cron script that auto commits 1-3 commits every day and noone could verify the importance of these commits. This is good because many people just got into the habit of updating their dotfiles once a day or do some very very insignificant things to keep the streak going. On the other side it's sad because the graph only showed involvement with open source. Private repositories shouldn't be in there to taint the image. I hope that with this people stop with artificial streak pushing and actually show their open source contributions only.

cyphar 10y ago

I think that the fact that GitHub doesn't count pushing to non-master branches as "contributing to free software" is quite silly. If I do a lot of work on a feature branch and it isn't merged, it doesn't count as "work". Not that I really care about imaginary green internet squares.

petetnt 10y ago

I think this is a great change. I don't go after internet points myself, but I think the graph has various other benefits than just showing how many times one can do a git commit in an hour. For example if I am sending an issue or a PR to an repo maintained by a single person, I can do some preliminary judging of response times and how likely is the change going to land by just from seeing the graph. Obviously private repos skewed this a lot: some people seem to have disappeared from the end of the earth, but in reality they might just be busy working on something else, privately. In general, the graph also works as personal log across ALL of my projects: everything I do is in GitHub, and I can easily see what kind of projects I have worked on in the past year and analyse my progress across all the projects I contribute to. I think it's a great tool with tons of benefits.

hiby007 10y ago

>Now that every paid plan includes unlimited private repositories, you can experiment all you want in private and still add to your contribution graph. For more information, read our help guide for toggling private contributions on your profile. I think this can also be used to show fake contribution within private repos with a bot like these https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti it becomes easy to show more activity without doing much work.

josteink 10y ago

With this change, I guess github has changed from being about open source to being about enterprise customers. Which is fine for a company which is about making money. That said, I think it's sad. It's a shame, but I guess that's just another signal that open source projects should find another home more fitting to their ideals (like gitlab).

detailyang 10y ago

so sad, cannot get 'long streak' :(