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Introducing Contributions
- glenjamin 14y agoI sent a support email suggesting this feature on the 17th of December - that's either a good turnaround time or they were already working on this! I think it's great for people who mostly contribute to others' projects, rather than starting their own - which is arguably a better way to get involved in open source.
- prezjordan 14y agoI've wanted this for a very long time. I'm in search of a summer internship, so I've been hoping for a way for potential employers to quickly see what I've been working on. Not just my own projects, but also my pull requests to other projects. Thumbs up for GitHub, this is a welcomed feature. Very attractive, too.
- int3 14y agoIndeed. It used to be that the only way to glean such information (for an arbitrary user) would be to crawl all the projects and sift through the data yourself. I'm hoping that they make this info available through the API, and allow us to see contributions over all time, instead of just in the last year / month.
- emperorcezar 14y agoEven more so. The majority of my work is in organizations. Before it was difficult to see what I was doing. Unless someone is really interested in my emacs settings.
- edna_piranha 14y agoomg that's me.
- coconutrandom 14y agoLook at that! Let's all give unrequested feedback on your crypto implementation. [puts on neckbeard]
- edna_piranha 14y agoshut up tim!
- MrMcDowall 14y agoShe should also add comments...
- fwenzel 14y agowoah woah
- cpeterso 14y agoDid GitHub notify you ahead of time or ask for permission to use your likeness to promote their company? :)
- chewxy 14y agoFINALLY. I've been wanting a summary page for all the projects I'm working on. I don't get the streak thing though
- dewski 14y agoThe streak is just the number of consecutive days that you've contributed at least 1 thing to a project on GitHub.
- chewxy 14y agoI have daily commits to a main branch of several of my projects but I'm on a 0 current streak. Also, damn, the disparity between my public and private profile is huge. Imma gonna commit more to open source!
- mpdaugherty 14y agoLooks like this is doing exactly what it's supposed to, then!
- deanpcmad 14y agoWow this is great GitHub. One of my fave features so far. It was always a pain to see my most popular repositories and to view the repos that I have contributed to!
- philipn 14y agoVery cool! I used calendaraboutnothing /extensively/ - it was a hugely important motivational tool for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this counts contributions to non-master branches? I work mostly in branches and my calenderaboutnothing streaks were much longer.
- jbarnette 14y agoYep, we don't count contributions until they hit a repository's default or gh-pages branch.
- foca 14y agoGet those pull requests merged! :)
- rtomayko 14y agoYour commits will count for the day they were committed once they're merged to master. i.e., It's the date on the commit that matters, not the date it's eventually pushed to master. A little weird since it means past days can fill in later but we wanted to make sure they were counted.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoWhat is this calendaraboutnothing of which you speak? Google wasn't very helpful here. I'm looking for a "streak-based calendar/motivational tool", and I gather that's what you are talking about.
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- beaumartinez 14y agoHm, I'm divided on this. It's cool to be able to see what someone works most on... But at the same time, there's the privacy concern of being able to see what someone works most on. I'd like the ability to turn it off—hell, you can already decide what repos you expose to the public, so why not activity? Of course, I realize that your activity on GitHub is public anyway—but it's never been so obvious.
- jaytaylor 14y agoIf you visit your "contributions" page while you are logged out, you will notice that all non-public activity is hidden. I feel that you've raised a valid concern -- for the sake of privacy it would be best to have the option to deactivate this feature.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- snprbob86 14y ago> If you visit your "contributions" page while you are logged out, you will notice that all non-public activity is hidden. This wasn't immediately clear to me, so I had to test it out with Incognito. As it is, my own view of my profile is dominated by repositories from my prior business for which I no longer have access to on GitHub. In general, I'd really prefer to be able to see my public profile. I guess it makes sense to let people know how much I contribute privately, but I want to be able to audit my public persona in much the same way Facebook has "View Profile As ____".
- Shank 14y agoMaybe just a simple "View Public?" checkbox on the page itself would do. I agree - I have to check incognito if I want to see what I've actually done the most work on that everyone sees.
- nod 14y agoThe privacy concern here seems just like the debate over the introduction of Facebook's newsfeed - that information was public, but not _obvious_.
- plg 14y agoQ: can you get these visualizations per project?
- munchor 14y agoTry "Graphs".
- rurounijones 14y agoCertainly makes github more recruiter friendly and more and more the techys' CV site. "Can I program and work in a team? am I active? Check out my github profile"
- jacques_chester 14y agoI don't know whether I'm pleased that it hides my private activity or whether -- because almost all my activity is in private repos -- to be upset by that :D Anyhow. Very pretty.
- robryan 14y agoWould be good to have some options to expose private activity for aggregation then also another option to expose the repo name you are committing to.
- jacques_chester 14y agoMaybe. I imagine they'll progressively roll this sort of stuff out, but why hold up the overall feature for the subset like me?
- icey 14y agoFor whatever it's worth, I'm in this subset with you. I use github for all my work now, but > 98% of what I do is in private repos.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoMaybe because it could draw unwanted attention of the presses - you want bloggers to write about awesome new feature, not about the potential implications of a hidden switch and what would happen if it's default state was different. It's easier to roll out such changes after people are already accustomed with the general idea.
- xbryanx 14y agoHeck no. Private is private. I don't want to have to manage another setting.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoAnother setting is not a problem, as long as they give it sane default value.
- tav 14y agoAs a fanatical user of calendaraboutnothing in the past, I'm stoked to see the streak graph on the profile page. As others have mentioned, it can be extremely motivating! However, I really don't care for most of my popular repos or some of the external ones I've contributed to. My ideal would be to hide repos that I don't care about and to highlight the ones that I want to showcase. The "Contribution Activity" stuff is totally fine, but given how much the public repos reflect the "personality" of an individual, I am a little saddened that it's being lost in the sea of popularity. It'd be nice to be able to reclaim some control over that. Edit: To clarify, two of my popular repos with a few hundred watchers between them are efforts I spent all of a few evenings on. I am as proud of them as some notes I scribbled last week. In contrast, I have repos which I've poured months of effort into which I would rather highlight. Likewise, one of the repos to which I recently contributed is of such subpar quality that I'd rather not be publicly associated with it so prominently. Whilst I'm happy to help others out, knowing that it'd be displayed in such a prominent manner acts as an anti-incentive to partake in low quality projects. So, if any GitHubbers are listening... please replace "Popular Repositories" with "Highlighted Repositories" and give us more control over what gets displayed with regards repos we've contributed to. And, oh, whilst I'm at it, perhaps "Most Recent Streak" would be more motivating than "Current Streak" which I imagine would be at an awe-inspiring 0 for many of us way too often.
- funksta 14y agoGithub really needs a "deprecated" flag for repositories (maybe it has one already? I don't know of one). This wouldn't solve your specific issue with the weekend projects (assuming the code is still serviceable), but would really help the signal-to-noise ratios in these lists and on other areas of the site.
- justincormack 14y agoI guess you could check them into a new repo and delete the old one to lose the watchers... Or even create an archive account.
- jamie_ca 14y ago> And, oh, whilst I'm at it, perhaps "Most Recent Streak" would be more motivating than "Current Streak" which I imagine would be at an awe-inspiring 0 for many of us way too often. Not to mention, give it a day of leeway. I pushed code yesterday, but none yet today (it's still first thing) and my streak is 0.
- reledi 14y agoNice! A link to your gists (e.g. https://gist.github.com/username https://gist.github.com/username) would also be nice to have on your profile page.
- anderspetersson 14y agoA dream for someone looking at a github profile with the purpose of see if he/she should be hired or not.
- jjbohn 14y agoVery cool! It's interesting how much mine changes when I am logged in and can see all the private repositories I've contributed to at work.
- vassvdm 14y agoIt's interesting to see where GitHub is heading these days. The combination of software collaboration and showcasing projects / recruiter friendly profile pages is pretty compelling...
- Shank 14y agoI love the idea of Github as a resume, and this is easily one of the best features that push it in that direction. It allows for a quick glance at what an author contributes the most to, which can be a quick way of identifying the most successful projects they work on. It really fixes the problem that organizations always had of visibility. My commits to an org repo usually weren't visible on profile except in the feed and as a link to the organization. This is a big improvement.
- guptaneil 14y agoHa, if you look at a GitHub profile with a current streak of 0 days, the date range is "Rock - Hard Place" :)
- craigc 14y agoI love this. I was not crazy about some of the changes Github had been making lately, but this is great! Way easier to see what someone has done at a quick glance vs having to scroll through a long list of repos. The only thing I would suggest is like @tav said. They should change "Popular repositories" to "Featured repositories" and give users the option to edit the list. It could offer sort options (show 5 most recently active, show 5 most popular, show 5 most recently created) and also give an option to manually select which 5 to showcase and put them in a specific order. In my case popularity works fine, but considering this is a way to showcase yourself offering some additional control is not the end of the world in my opinion.
- rachelbythebay 14y agoI don't think I'll be using github for anything else. There's too much stuff which can't be disabled, deleted, or otherwise hidden. I don't like their idea of "sharing".
- clobber 14y agoStreak? C'mon, what is this, Xbox Live? Not all commits are created equal and I don't find this new 'contributions' calendar/graph at all useful. You still cannot get a good snapshot of contributions for users that are members of organizations.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- freditup 14y agoAgreed - it's great to see what people have been contributing to and working on - but the number of commits and days in a row with a commit seem like meaningless data.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoWell, measuring the quality of commits is an AI-complete task, so we need some proxies. Number of commits seems to encourage more small commits, which AFAIR is what is preferred in Git. Days in a row is an old "don't break the chain" trick. > Streak? C'mon, what is this, Xbox Live? Most likely, yes. I guess it's not about what that data means, it's more about what it does to you. I dread to use this word, but it's gamification.
- chimeracoder 14y ago> I dread to use this word, but it's gamification. Which is the problem. I already enjoy writing code, and I don't need it to be gamified in order to give me an incentive to do so. Worse, gamifying it skews the incentives, reducing overall code quality in the process.
- aantix 14y agoThere's a repo that I am co-own, but since it was originally created by my colleague, it's shows up as he's the owner. Wish there was a way to make a repo equally credited on multiple profiles..
- mbell 14y agoIs it just me or does this only count commits to master? Nothing in branches seems to show up for me.
- holman 14y agoIt only counts commits made to a master (or default) branch. Once your branch gets merged, we'll backfill all of your contributions.
- richo 14y agoAwesome work dudes, I've been wanting something like this for a while.
- jbellis 14y agoHmm, doesn't seem to be connecting all the dots. None of the committers to Cassandra show Contributions there on their profiles: https://github.com/apache/cassandra/graphs/contributors https://github.com/apache/cassandra/graphs/contributors
- sailfast 14y agoAs someone that's been working to wrap my head around how to work with and develop d3.js visualizations, this provides a great example of what's possible. Looks good, and the source definitely gives me a few things to investigate!
- nicpottier 14y agoThat's an interesting visualization of every day in the year. Anybody know if there is a standard name for them and/or any good tools for generating them in JS?
- kfl 14y agoIt looks a lot like the d3 calendar view example: http://bl.ocks.org/4063318 http://bl.ocks.org/4063318 http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111018/calendar.html http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111018/calendar.html Layout inspired by Rick Wicklin and Robert Allison (http://stat-computing.org/dataexpo/2009/posters/ http://stat-computing.org/dataexpo/2009/posters/)
- eps 14y agoLooks great. How can I disable this for my account?
- moe 14y agoTerrible. There's a good idea buried somewhere in this, but they managed to completely miss the mark. 1. It needs an off-switch (globally and per repo). How did this feature get out the door without that switch? Does Zuckerberg manage product at github now? 2. The data is useless. What does it tell me that ednapiranha "contributed" to X during the last month, without any quantification? Nothing. 3. The data is useless. For most people the "popular repositories"-box shows 5 popular projects that they have forked... 4. The data is useless. When I want to see what a user (or myself) has contributed to then I want to see all of it, not the last 1 month. Github appeals to the self-improvement, tomato-timer, fitbit crowd here. Those people will start blogging in no time about how "commit-streak tracking changed my life", from their barefoot standing desks. For everyone else these vanity-stats are worse than wasted space; they are visual noise that pretends to convey useful information but doesn't.
- tomchristie 14y ago> Github appeals to the self-improvement, tomato-timer, fitbit crowd here. What a bunch of bullshit. It's a tool. Thousands upon thousands of people use it daily because it helps them get stuff done. If you don't happen to like the way it's presented, fine, but that's a personal preference, not a lifestyle choice.
- moe 14y agoI'm sure you also wanted to say something about the points I made but alas your tomato timer rang before you got to it, right?
- tomchristie 14y agoNo not really, I wanted to say something about the attitude. I didn't think the points merited response, because it's self-evident that the blanket statement of 'the data is useless' simply isn't the case. Anyway, let me be specific: 1. I can see why folks might want to be able to turn it on or off, but introducing visual inconsistency between different user profiles would feel pretty wonky to me. 2. Keeps the information dense. I don't need to know exactly what was committed in order for the information to be broadly useful. 3. Incorrect. 4. Recent = relevant. That's not to say that I think it's perfect - for example, the 'current streak' will tend to 0 days for most users as noted by other comments, but overall I think it hangs together pretty well.
- cytzol 14y agoI'm not sure I like this. It's generally considered that there's no effective way to measure productivity[0]. Whenever you introduce metrics, programmers end up gaming it: pay them by lines of code, they write too many lines of code; pay them by commit, and they're going to start committing too much. These graphs are going to just cause programmers to both commit in too small chunks (or splitting up a commit into several), or delaying some overnight so that they have a longer streak. I know that the data was there already, but now it's made visible, people are going to start commenting on how much I'm coding. [0]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/324399/what-is-a-fair-productivity-measurement-technique-for-programmers http://stackoverflow.com/questions/324399/what-is-a-fair-pro...
- tomchristie 14y agoI think it works really nicely. I wouldn't necessarily treat it as a measure of productivity, but it does help give an indication of consistency and trend. I also like the idea of annotating it (perhaps that'll come as a feature sometime) It'd be nice to be able to mark on coding sprints & events.
- tazer 14y agoLike the idé , But don't know if it's that useful cause, It changes depending on who you are. Example if your Anonymous you went see much. If your a member of same Organization as the User your viewing , you will see different stats. And you self will also see other stats. So not sure whats the use-fullness of the feature.
- nicholassmith 14y agoSeems this has been some what divisive looking over the comments already posted here. Kudos for GitHub trying something different, it's a small tool that might help motivate people to keep going, in the same way fitness trackers do.
- plentz 14y agoWhen I read this news I was expecting something like this http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Stefan http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Stefan (show all repos that this person had done any commits/opened issues). Kinda sad.
- telemachos 14y agoI love it overall, but it would be great if the user could fine tune it a bit. An example: Under "Repositories contributed to" on my page, I see two repos from a place I worked. Those repos are private, and after I left, I had my commit rights revoked (reasonably enough!). But the odd upshot is this: those two repos show up on my page, and yet if I follow the links, I get a 404 page (which is how GH handles this situation: "you're trying to look at a private repo where you are not a collaborator".). Since that's the case, it would be great if I could manually remove those two repos. (Note: if I logout, those repos no longer appear. So I'm not complaining about what others see - which I think is handled very well. I'm just wishing that I had more control over what I saw.)
- IceyEC 14y agoIf those repos are private repos, they show up to you and others that can see the repos but not to other users. I jsut checked that on my profile and half of my repos changed!
- unwind 14y agoHaving taken a few seconds to look at my (meager) contributions, it took me a while to understand the vertical axis of the field of boxes. Then it hit me: it's happily US-centric, with weeks starting with Sunday. Aaargh. This should really be a user setting, since in my mind weeks start with Mondays.