
Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs - brianllamar
https://blog.github.com/2018-06-07-what-laser-cutting-taught-me-about-contribution-graphs/
======
Shank
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
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
Github is already essentially Linkedin for developers.

~~~
paulie_a
Except GitHub doesn't steal your contact list and then send fraudulent
notifications to them like LinkedIn does.

~~~
fake-name
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
Happened to me too. Told me to email them back to "unsubscribe", which of
course didn't work. They train my spam filters now.

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palferrari
[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
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 :-)

------
ISL
An aside: the contribution graph can be gamed:

[https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti](https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti)

~~~
drhodes
On a more mundane note, they also don't track commits on forked repos.

~~~
glandium
They also don't track commits on branches other than the default one.

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saagarjha
> 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
What goes into the graph is documented here:
[https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-
yo...](https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-your-
profile/)

------
amelius
> 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 ...

~~~
grenran
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)

