4 ms·
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 ne
by 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 agoI 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 agoI'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 agoThen 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 agoThe 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.
- sdesol 10y agoI'm kind of surprised streaks and such, are things people feel so strongly about. This is how it's used in my product. http://imgur.com/5uy9DSp http://imgur.com/5uy9DSp The heatmaps are created based on the search results, so if you want to see your contributions, you'll just search for your email. Searches are at the branch level and you can search across multiple branches from different repositories, and so forth. My intentions for the heatmaps was never to help you visualize commit streaks though. Their purpose was to help you visualize search results, to make it easier for you to drill into certain timelines.
- shiro 10y agoBut it only shows up to 1 year... I wish they made the number available on the page only the account owner could see.
- nv-vn 10y agoDefinitely same here. I started working on some personal projects for Github this winter and ended up getting a long streak of about a month from it. Since then, I've been in the habit of getting long streaks and try to do 2+ commits every day, but as soon as I fall off that streak it takes me 2-3 days to think about contributing again. Not only does it motivate me to write code (almost) every day (which I'd argue is important to developing programming skill), but it also pushes me to share code I was already going to write, which I think is a win-win for everybody.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoYeah, I'm sad about this too. I sort of knew the counter was there, but never paid any attention to it... until very recently. I started to use it as a self-motivating tool to always do even minimum amount of work one of the numerous after-hours projects I have. So now that I started to use it, they cut it out. sigh
- sublimino 10y agoThere is an analogous productivity method called "Don't Break the Chain" involving a prominently-placed real calendar, and big red crosses denoting daily successes. It triggers the same (rightly) proud sensation. Anecdotally I preferred it to GitHub streaks (as I rarely look at my profile). Any habit tracker site/app will also do this for you - I automate mine with GitHub API data, and get a similar effect (the app notifies of streaks daily).
- rtpg 10y agoDo you have an example app that will do this for you?
- cmdrfred 10y agoI use dontbreakthechain.com
- clessg 10y agoI like https://chains.cc/ https://chains.cc/, though I'm not aware of any way to automate it.
- 0xCMP 10y agoCommit on iOS is a well made example. OrgMode also handles this out of the box (or at least what you'd call out of the box on OrgMode...)
- sublimino 10y agoI use coach.me - the automation is via their undocumented mobile APIs https://github.com/jmaddi/liftapp-client https://github.com/jmaddi/liftapp-client (Lift is coach.me's previous branding)
- robotpony 10y agoI've seen a few applicants who had faked Github profile graph data. I found this a good indicator of the developer personality/ethics, and we happily passed on them.
- sov 10y agoIf you've passed on them how could you know whether or not it was actually a good indicator of personality/ethics?
- wotter 10y agoHow do you fake it? And how do you know if someone's faked it? :S
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoChecking their actual commits. If their activity is menial like adding a letter to a file over and over, they obviously aren't legitimately writing that much code.
- Jach 10y agohttps://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti and similar are pretty easy to spot. As a user I'd be biased to someone who used that for fun over someone who ('faking' or in all seriousness) has a ton of repos with lots of activity that are ultimately just things like node's left-pad...
- avinassh 10y agoBy using tools like Rockstar - https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar (PS: I wrote it)
- briansteffens 10y agoAgreed, mine was the only streak I ever paid attention to and for the last few months it really kept me going, making at least one little contribution per day.
- exstudent2 10y agoNon-broken streaks are also how Seinfeld keeps motivated: http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se... That's how I was using the feature. Now I'm sad it's gone.
- ericjang 10y agoWhat about HN karma?
- minimaxir 10y agoEspecially HN karma.
- RichieAHB 10y agoJust upvoted you, you will be happy to know.
- steveklabnik 10y agoHN has changed over the years, too. For example, each comment used to show its point count to every user, but it was eventually changed to be hidden to everyone but the user who made the comment.
- tikhonj 10y agoHN used to show the average number of votes/post on your profile and it certainly affected my posting habits. It made me less likely to carry on conversations in the comments or post on stories that either had too much activity or had been on the front page for too long. There were some benefits too (I started writing more substantial comments), but the net effect had some unintended problems, so I'm pretty happy they got rid of that metric. Karma has some problems too, and could no doubt do with some adjustments, but I think that it's more useful to have it than not.
- AndrewHampton 10y agoI mostly agree. The one thing I really miss is a bookmarklet I made that would highlight the top five posts on a comments page. This was especially useful for quickly finding the gems on pages with hundreds of comments. I wish there was an easy way to discover highly voted comments deeper in the threads.
- p4wnc6 10y ago