

Commit to Keep Coding – GitHub + Beeminder - dreeves
http://gitminder.com

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bsoule
I'm the Bee in Beeminder. I think that beeminding your github account is going
to be amazing for hackers/founders -- a way to force yourself to always be
making forward momentum. We've been tracking how much code we write for over a
year now -- though in a bit more structured way. We track user visible
improvements (it has to be something worthy of tweeting @beemuvi for the
hardcore fans of beeminder). We've been doing one-per-day for 733 days now and
if we ever fall behind we pay a user $1000. It's been invaluable in keeping us
going!

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dreeves
Summary for those not familiar with the craziness that is Beeminder: It's a
combination of quantified-self tool and a commitment device app (like StickK
and GymPact and Aherk) where you put up money, to be paid if you don't do what
you said you were going to do. In this case you're pledging to push commits or
close issues a certain number of times per week.

The money aspect sounds super perverse, but we think of it as paying a fee for
a service (the graphs, reminders, etc) that happens to be waived if you never
need Beeminder's kick in the pants.

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mappum
I don't think counting commits is a good metric, because I know if it were me,
I would start splitting my commits up into trivial changes in order to meet
the count ("added comment", "added line break", etc).

It supports going by issues, which is better, but how about counting
additions/deletions?

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dreeves
Ooh, yes, GitHub's impact metric. We should add that.

I think minding commits isn't as bad as it could be theoretically though. I
feel like pride is sufficient deterrent not to do pointless commits. And
general pressure for more fine-grained commits is probably valuable.

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mappum
Well, the repo I'm thinking about using this on is private, so I have no pride
and no shame.

Wait, I guess this doesn't support private repos.

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dreeves
Oh, Gitminder does let you beemind private repos, as long as the github
account you oauth with has access to it.

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dy
Very cool - anyone who's following pg's advice to "stay alive" would be well
advised to git committing :)

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beneills
Can we get details about the way this is implemented?

I assume you poll Github on some timescale? I noticed that Beeminder took
around 24h to see my commits.

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andrewpbrett
We are in fact polling using the GitHub API, but it should be hourly, not
daily.

Right after I finished this we noticed that we could also do this with a post
commit hook, so we're planning to implement that as well.

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eggspurt
I want folks to commit to removing bugs!

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JoeAltmaier
New development is destabilizing. That means more bugs. I want folks to commit
to creating bugs too!

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dreeves
Ha, great point! For our own User-Visible Improvements goal we initially felt
like it shouldn't count to fix a bug that we had only just created, since
that's not exactly a net improvement. But then we decided that it's fine to
count it, for exactly the reason you say.

We haven't gone quite so far as to count the actual creation of the bugs
towards our goal though. :)

