
Show HN: Posters of Your GitHub Contributions - aarondf
https://commitprint.com/
======
lolsal
I think the site is nice - it's clean and directly to the point. No huge hero
and no click-throughs to get to the meat of your project. Prices for your
posters seem entirely reasonable.

Tangent: I don't understand the fascination with one's own commit heatmap (or
any other commit heatmap for that matter). Maybe it seems a bit too self-
congratulatory? Vain? I don't know quite what it is, but it rubs me the wrong
way and I wouldn't be interested in putting something up like that in my home
or office. Maybe because it implies quantity over quality? Whatever the
reason, your poster project is nice regardless of whether or not I would buy
one.

~~~
stocktech
A team commit heatmap would be great for the office tho...

~~~
city41
In that case, I think it'd be more interesting to throw it up on a large
monitor and have it update every day.

------
aarondf
Hey yall, looks like it's being hugged to death right now... I'm trying to
keep up!

~~~
ortuna
Hey, great work!

Similar to my project [https://commits.io](https://commits.io)

Shoot me an email (ortuna AT gmail) if you want to compare notes. I've done a
lot of work on how to get those generation times down.

~~~
jastanton
I would love to order a poster but I just cannot get over the whole --
exposing my teams private code to a 3rd party thing. Any chance you have a
hosted version of this?

~~~
hueving
You could always write a script that walks the real commits of your repo and
generates fake commits in a public repo with the same timestamps but no
meaningful changes or commit messages.

------
tuxracer
Cool project! Quick suggestion: Ditch the "Update preview" button and
immediately update the preview after you make new choices.

------
smortaz
Is there a way to get these for a repo? I'd love order a couple for my teams.
Thanks!

------
debt
Very cool. I think there's a lot of focus on code quality and organization and
shit; sometimes it's important to remember you built something! You should be
proud of yourself.

------
rhabarba
It makes me sad to see that people actively contribute to the implicit "open
source = Github" assumption. Open Source has always been successful because
there was more than just a single distributor for almost anything.

I hope I'll see a new rise of decentralized solutions. For now I'm frightened
of the monopolism here.

~~~
andrewstuart2
GitHub is so strongly associated with Open Source right now for a few reasons.

First, git is decentralized by default. GitHub has very little secret sauce
here; most, if not all, of their cool git tricks are actually pushed upstream
into the git client to benefit everybody. For remote management, I can run
`git init --bare` in any directory on any ol' ssh box I want and then set it
up as a remote and get the same exact `git push` experience. Or use any of the
strategies that git supports for interacting with remotes.

So GitHub chose a great decentralized tool as their foundation, and then _got
the community UX right_. There's easy permissions management, easy SSH key
management and instructions, issue and PR tracking, easily-accessed
discussion, etc. GitHub is 95% about community and 5% about easy repo
management, IMO.

That said, they're no longer the only player in town. They're the most
universally understood, but you can easily set up a GitLab CE server on your
own hardware if you want the same thing for free, but there are management
costs associated with that.

I think the other critical reason GitHub is associated with open source
software is that, after all, it's 100% free for open source software. You get
all the above features for free if you don't discriminate about who can see
and clone your code. GitLab will give you free private repos, but in my
opinion I think GitHub takes the better stance here for the Open Source world.
"You want free tools? You have to either pay up or share."

~~~
IgorPartola
git is decentralized, but the most common workflow makes it basically a
slightly better SVN. There is always one authoritative upstream repo, and
everyone just pushes to that. Really, GitHub + git is better than SVN in only
two ways: better merge tools to make branches cheaper, and local branches.
Almost everything else could already be done with SVN (or similar) before.
git's decentralized nature is only really used by the Linux kernel developers
AFAIK.

~~~
minitech
You can commit without pushing, and generally have full freedom to rearrange
your repository locally. So no, lots of us make use of Git’s decentralization
all the time, even without mailing patches.

------
pwny
Love the look of the site!

How are you getting these printed and shipped? Do you do it yourself or
consume a 3rd party service?

------
humming
I like the idea a lot! I wish there were several ways of visualizing activity
so that you might get a more accurate representation of achievement, although
that feedback is for github. I like the logo - it's a simple design that
represents that product well.

~~~
aarondf
Thanks humming! I'm glad you like the logo, it just came to me right before I
launched. Very pleased with how it turned out.

------
queicherius
Pretty cool idea. When I type in my Github name (queicherius) and choose any
year however, "february" shows up twice:
[http://i.imgur.com/MrI9r6a.png](http://i.imgur.com/MrI9r6a.png)

~~~
aarondf
Sorry about that, should be fixed now. Was having some pretty serious issues
yesterday.

------
madamelic
This would be so much cooler if it was wall-mounted art and 365 LEDs.

I'm not big into electronics, but can't you adjust LED's brightness by
changing what voltage is sent to them?

~~~
nothrabannosir
(It's usually done with a PWM, not voltage. That's easier to regulate.)

------
xroker
A made a similar project for Android smartphones "Github Contributions
Widget".
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=by.aleks.ghcwi...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=by.aleks.ghcwidget)
The app is open source
[https://github.com/xRoker/GHCWidget](https://github.com/xRoker/GHCWidget)

------
jrm2k6
If you just want a little widget to display and not necessarily a poster,
there is also this:
[https://github.com/jrm2k6/contwidgetor](https://github.com/jrm2k6/contwidgetor)
(gets your bitbucket contributions as well).

------
wooshy
Awesome site and idea! I hope you figure out how to work your bottlenecks out

------
gravypod
What about private repos. Will this work?

~~~
passivepinetree
From the FAQ on the site:

"I don't have a lot of public commits, can I use private commits?

You can, actually. You'll have to make that change on github.com though. Go to
your profile and scroll down until you see your contribution graph and click
"contribution settings" to change it."

------
kuon
I guess the site might be overloaded, I tried with my github but it's just
spinning.

------
ahm786
Cool stuff!

------
googletron
blatant gyroscope rip off. nice effort in hacking it together though.

~~~
spraak
Link to which Gyroscope you mean? It's a very general search term and I
haven't come across a service named that otherwise.

In any case, I doubt so, or it doesn't even matter. Nothing in the world is
really so unique, and especially app ideas on the internet. It's not a new
idea to make an infographic style poster from data, so who's ripping off whom?

~~~
ezekg
I think it may be [https://gyrosco.pe/store](https://gyrosco.pe/store). Either
way, not entirely sure ripoff is the correct assumption.

