12 ms·

Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

138 points by brianllamar 8y ago

Shank 8y ago
I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in GitHub's profile system, and this is a good example of it. The contribution graph looks pretty -- but what if it could be a souvenir? A lot of programming projects are hard to quantify in terms of success -- besides shipping the product, it's hard to see visible signs of bug reporting, refactoring, etc. I'd love to see GitHub selling physical tokens that measure this. She did a fantastic job with this project -- but applying it to a commercial side as part of the shop would be cool. I'm not sure how well anything like this can scale, though. I'd also like to see more exploration beyond the contribution graph for measuring impact. I know it's not perfect, but it is neat.
- tmpz22 8y ago
  I'd hate to see github turned into LinkedIn or some other recruiting system that sells profile information in exchange for personal validation. Merit systems are also easily gamed or warped to fit the cultural narrative, for boot licking, sabotage - it is not Github's core business and they should stay out of it (IMO).
  - BoysenberryPi 8y ago
    Github is already essentially Linkedin for developers.
    - tmpz22 8y ago
      Yea but unlike LinkedIn people don't put their entire resume and a litany of other personal info on the front page. Yes your resume website might be in your github, but the exposure is much more intentional.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      Except GitHub doesn't steal your contact list and then send fraudulent notifications to them like LinkedIn does.
      - bradknowles 8y ago
        So far. Let's see how long that lasts.
      - fake-name 8y ago
        Well, github doesn't. I have had assholes scrape my commits for the commit e-mail address, and spam me already. Give it time.
        MaulingMonkey 8y ago
        Happened to me too. Told me to email them back to "unsubscribe", which of course didn't work. They train my spam filters now.
    - hueving 8y ago
      Maybe for junior devs to get their foot in the door, but not for any higher level positions. You can't tell very much about someone's engineering skills based on some public commits to a side project and very few people (<1%) are writing open source professionally.
      - dvtrn 8y ago
        I wished more recruiters got this. The bulk of many professional's work i would imagine is deemed proprietary company property and not everyone really has the life that affords them the time to commit frequently to someone else's pet project repository because we have kids and families that soak up that time. "Do you have a GitHub profile?" Is a question thats making me raise an eyebrow more and more lately, what if I don't? What's that say about me that I'm not constantly constantly distributing my code to everyone else via public repositories? Yes I have a github profile but all you're going to find is a Jekyll site where I blog about model airplanes and geek off about air traffic control chatter. Doubt that's very interesting content for a guy who works in fintech
        gear54rus 8y ago
        > what if I don't? god I hope this is exaggerated lol. Filthy recruiter, how can they even ask such a question. How dare they ask whether I make tech world better outside my job. Muh keeds, muh family. > my code The one that is built on titanic effort of others not all of which was compensated in any way at all?
        Double_a_92 8y ago
        To other jobs have such requirements? And also what should you do? Throw away your non-engineering private life so you can find a job easier later at some point?
        gear54rus 8y ago
        >To other jobs have such requirements? Do other jobs have such benefits? Remote work all over the globe for example? The fact that everyone needs IT these days and so you have tons of work? Nice comfy offices? Apples to oranges won't fly. > And also what should you do? Find a work-life balance instead of answering a fair question with a defensive silly question of your own (I ain't even a recruiter and that answer right there made me lol, imagine a guy having to listen to that defensive shit and still having to try and salvage a candidate because he may have strict job requirements). And by that balance I mean either work your ass off to produce quality code in your spare time and stand out among candidates or don't and someone else will stand out instead. Also check out the irony with this 'my code' stuff too. That's exactly why you have to work ass off in spare time: because every employer goes 'quack! it's my code, don't show it to anyone' so you can't share it with another recruiter.
  - btlr 8y ago
    I frequently get emails from people who have skimmed my address from my profile (usually by looking through the stars or watchers of popular repos). I ended up setting my public email on GitHub to an alias so I could filter it out.
  - celticninja 8y ago
    I hate to break it to you but GitHub is already used as a recruiting tool.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Another thing that would make an interesting souvenir, I think, would be if you could figure out how to condense the fork graph into something that fit on a T-shirt or something somehow. It's pretty interesting how unique that graph can look based on how different PRs were developed and merged over time.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  A software engineer's job is to solve a problem with the minimum amount of commits, lines of code and complexity as possible. This obsession with commits as "contributions" is demeaning.
  - jna_sh 8y ago
    The contribution graph displays a lot more than just commits, for what it’s worth. https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-your-profile/ https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-yo... “- Committing to a repository's default branch or gh-pages branch - Opening an issue - Proposing a pull request - Submitting a pull request review - Co-authoring commits in a repository's default branch or gh-pages branch”
- jessewmc 8y ago
  Reminds me of a project posted here a little while ago for exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13552376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13552376
- kakwa_ 8y ago
  > I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in GitHub's profile system I'm a bit sad they removed the "punch card" in the projects statistic. This was a great tool to see if a project was a side project from a lone individual or something with people paid to work on it daily from 9am to 6pm. (I tend to prefer the second in my choice of dependencies, because there are less likely to be abandoned).
- theveloped 8y ago
  We develop a small SaaS solution to let sheet metal manufacturers accept custom orders online. If you are indeed interested in setting up a kind of physical token store for these I would love to help out and link this up to an actual manufacturing plant! To hook in on the rest of the debate. It might not be the best measure to qualitatively or even quantitatively compare developer contributions. But a physical token as memento would definitely be an awesome way to be thanked for contributing to a project instead of the old buy-me-a-coffee-button.
ISL 8y ago
An aside: the contribution graph can be gamed: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
- drhodes 8y ago
  On a more mundane note, they also don't track commits on forked repos.
  - glandium 8y ago
    They also don't track commits on branches other than the default one.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Your contribution graph should never be assumed to be an authoritative statement on your activity, and for sure, you can have dozens of typo correction PRs on a day versus another person's major feature, and the typos look like you did "more". But what I found was very neat about the contribution graph, and why I was so disappointed they removed the streak counts, was it was a good self-motivational tool. As a hobbyist coder, having an encouragement to keep a streak going by looking at code (either mine, or someone else's), and try to improve it in some way on a daily basis was a really good push for me. I think it's obvious from my full contribution graph (visible at https://github-contributions.now.sh/ https://github-contributions.now.sh/ under my username) where I was using the contribution graph/streaks to encourage me to contribute more in late 2015 and early 2016, and you can see how much it fell off when they removed the streak count in May of 2016. Which is to say, healthily used, you can be honest with yourself and use it to encourage yourself to continue participating, but obviously, it's bad as a metric of how much a person codes in general.
- KenanSulayman 8y ago
  You don't need something like gitfiti. Just use the date parameter of the git commit command: git commit --date "Foo Jan 1 00:00:01 CEST 2011" -m "What".
- kakwa_ 8y ago
saagarjha 8y ago
> I dove into testing different methods within Puppeteer and was able to grab screenshots of contribution graphs from GitHub usernames. Is there no API for contribution graphs, or formula that GitHub uses to generate these based on previous activity?
- jna_sh 8y ago
  What goes into the graph is documented here: https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-your-profile/ https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-yo...
palferrari 8y ago
https://github.com/ryanml/Github-Game-of-Life https://github.com/ryanml/Github-Game-of-Life Something fun I did with the contribution graph a couple of years ago. Lets you play Conway's Game of Life (sort of) with the graph. More crowded contribution graphs make for slightly less interesting generations. You can enable/disable cells if you'd like.
- palferrari 8y ago
  I realize that the code for this is far from fantastic... One of these days I am sure I will get around to refactoring it :-)
amelius 8y ago
> it takes 100 commits to turn a gray square green on her contribution graph I wonder if people "game" the system here (since apparently it's an important metric). For example, you could split a commit in two ...
- angrygoat 8y ago
  I had it pretty much solid green at one point, thanks to a hacky script that polled a website and committed & pushed the content as it changed. Wasn't even trying to game it, but it would be incredibly easy to do so.
- grenran 8y ago
  Hell you could even create backdated fake commits if you wanted to. https://github.com/tickelton/ghdecoy https://github.com/tickelton/ghdecoy https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti

138 points by brianllamar 8y ago

I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in GitHub's profile system, and this is a good example of it. The contribution graph looks pretty -- but what if it could be a souvenir? A lot of programming projects are hard to quantify in terms of success -- besides shipping the product, it's hard to see visible signs of bug reporting, refactoring, etc. I'd love to see GitHub selling physical tokens that measure this. She did a fantastic job with this project -- but applying it to a commercial side as part of the shop would be cool. I'm not sure how well anything like this can scale, though. I'd also like to see more exploration beyond the contribution graph for measuring impact. I know it's not perfect, but it is neat.

tmpz22 8y ago
I'd hate to see github turned into LinkedIn or some other recruiting system that sells profile information in exchange for personal validation. Merit systems are also easily gamed or warped to fit the cultural narrative, for boot licking, sabotage - it is not Github's core business and they should stay out of it (IMO).
- BoysenberryPi 8y ago
  Github is already essentially Linkedin for developers.
  - tmpz22 8y ago
    Yea but unlike LinkedIn people don't put their entire resume and a litany of other personal info on the front page. Yes your resume website might be in your github, but the exposure is much more intentional.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Except GitHub doesn't steal your contact list and then send fraudulent notifications to them like LinkedIn does.
    - bradknowles 8y ago
      So far. Let's see how long that lasts.
    - fake-name 8y ago
      Well, github doesn't. I have had assholes scrape my commits for the commit e-mail address, and spam me already. Give it time.
      - MaulingMonkey 8y ago
        Happened to me too. Told me to email them back to "unsubscribe", which of course didn't work. They train my spam filters now.
  - hueving 8y ago
    Maybe for junior devs to get their foot in the door, but not for any higher level positions. You can't tell very much about someone's engineering skills based on some public commits to a side project and very few people (<1%) are writing open source professionally.
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      I wished more recruiters got this. The bulk of many professional's work i would imagine is deemed proprietary company property and not everyone really has the life that affords them the time to commit frequently to someone else's pet project repository because we have kids and families that soak up that time. "Do you have a GitHub profile?" Is a question thats making me raise an eyebrow more and more lately, what if I don't? What's that say about me that I'm not constantly constantly distributing my code to everyone else via public repositories? Yes I have a github profile but all you're going to find is a Jekyll site where I blog about model airplanes and geek off about air traffic control chatter. Doubt that's very interesting content for a guy who works in fintech
      - gear54rus 8y ago
        > what if I don't? god I hope this is exaggerated lol. Filthy recruiter, how can they even ask such a question. How dare they ask whether I make tech world better outside my job. Muh keeds, muh family. > my code The one that is built on titanic effort of others not all of which was compensated in any way at all?
        Double_a_92 8y ago
        To other jobs have such requirements? And also what should you do? Throw away your non-engineering private life so you can find a job easier later at some point?
        gear54rus 8y ago
        >To other jobs have such requirements? Do other jobs have such benefits? Remote work all over the globe for example? The fact that everyone needs IT these days and so you have tons of work? Nice comfy offices? Apples to oranges won't fly. > And also what should you do? Find a work-life balance instead of answering a fair question with a defensive silly question of your own (I ain't even a recruiter and that answer right there made me lol, imagine a guy having to listen to that defensive shit and still having to try and salvage a candidate because he may have strict job requirements). And by that balance I mean either work your ass off to produce quality code in your spare time and stand out among candidates or don't and someone else will stand out instead. Also check out the irony with this 'my code' stuff too. That's exactly why you have to work ass off in spare time: because every employer goes 'quack! it's my code, don't show it to anyone' so you can't share it with another recruiter.
- btlr 8y ago
  I frequently get emails from people who have skimmed my address from my profile (usually by looking through the stars or watchers of popular repos). I ended up setting my public email on GitHub to an alias so I could filter it out.
- celticninja 8y ago
  I hate to break it to you but GitHub is already used as a recruiting tool.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Another thing that would make an interesting souvenir, I think, would be if you could figure out how to condense the fork graph into something that fit on a T-shirt or something somehow. It's pretty interesting how unique that graph can look based on how different PRs were developed and merged over time.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
A software engineer's job is to solve a problem with the minimum amount of commits, lines of code and complexity as possible. This obsession with commits as "contributions" is demeaning.
- jna_sh 8y ago
  The contribution graph displays a lot more than just commits, for what it’s worth. https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-your-profile/ https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-yo... “- Committing to a repository's default branch or gh-pages branch - Opening an issue - Proposing a pull request - Submitting a pull request review - Co-authoring commits in a repository's default branch or gh-pages branch”
jessewmc 8y ago
Reminds me of a project posted here a little while ago for exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13552376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13552376
kakwa_ 8y ago
> I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in GitHub's profile system I'm a bit sad they removed the "punch card" in the projects statistic. This was a great tool to see if a project was a side project from a lone individual or something with people paid to work on it daily from 9am to 6pm. (I tend to prefer the second in my choice of dependencies, because there are less likely to be abandoned).
theveloped 8y ago
We develop a small SaaS solution to let sheet metal manufacturers accept custom orders online. If you are indeed interested in setting up a kind of physical token store for these I would love to help out and link this up to an actual manufacturing plant! To hook in on the rest of the debate. It might not be the best measure to qualitatively or even quantitatively compare developer contributions. But a physical token as memento would definitely be an awesome way to be thanked for contributing to a project instead of the old buy-me-a-coffee-button.

ISL 8y ago

An aside: the contribution graph can be gamed: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti

drhodes 8y ago
On a more mundane note, they also don't track commits on forked repos.
- glandium 8y ago
  They also don't track commits on branches other than the default one.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Your contribution graph should never be assumed to be an authoritative statement on your activity, and for sure, you can have dozens of typo correction PRs on a day versus another person's major feature, and the typos look like you did "more". But what I found was very neat about the contribution graph, and why I was so disappointed they removed the streak counts, was it was a good self-motivational tool. As a hobbyist coder, having an encouragement to keep a streak going by looking at code (either mine, or someone else's), and try to improve it in some way on a daily basis was a really good push for me. I think it's obvious from my full contribution graph (visible at https://github-contributions.now.sh/ https://github-contributions.now.sh/ under my username) where I was using the contribution graph/streaks to encourage me to contribute more in late 2015 and early 2016, and you can see how much it fell off when they removed the streak count in May of 2016. Which is to say, healthily used, you can be honest with yourself and use it to encourage yourself to continue participating, but obviously, it's bad as a metric of how much a person codes in general.
KenanSulayman 8y ago
You don't need something like gitfiti. Just use the date parameter of the git commit command: git commit --date "Foo Jan 1 00:00:01 CEST 2011" -m "What".
kakwa_ 8y ago

saagarjha 8y ago

> I dove into testing different methods within Puppeteer and was able to grab screenshots of contribution graphs from GitHub usernames. Is there no API for contribution graphs, or formula that GitHub uses to generate these based on previous activity?

jna_sh 8y ago
What goes into the graph is documented here: https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-your-profile/ https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-yo...

palferrari 8y ago

https://github.com/ryanml/Github-Game-of-Life https://github.com/ryanml/Github-Game-of-Life Something fun I did with the contribution graph a couple of years ago. Lets you play Conway's Game of Life (sort of) with the graph. More crowded contribution graphs make for slightly less interesting generations. You can enable/disable cells if you'd like.

palferrari 8y ago
I realize that the code for this is far from fantastic... One of these days I am sure I will get around to refactoring it :-)

amelius 8y ago

> it takes 100 commits to turn a gray square green on her contribution graph I wonder if people "game" the system here (since apparently it's an important metric). For example, you could split a commit in two ...

angrygoat 8y ago
I had it pretty much solid green at one point, thanks to a hacky script that polled a website and committed & pushed the content as it changed. Wasn't even trying to game it, but it would be incredibly easy to do so.
grenran 8y ago
Hell you could even create backdated fake commits if you wanted to. https://github.com/tickelton/ghdecoy https://github.com/tickelton/ghdecoy https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti