My first one-year GitHub contribution streak

Today marks my first one-year GitHub contribution streak! ✌️ If I hadn’t missed one on November 3, 2019, this would have been on as early as mid-October, but hey, such is life.

I fully acknowledge that the contribution streak by no means reflects neither actual contribution to open source projects, commitment to growth in skills and knowledge, nor even productivity. Artificially keeping it going is as easy as creating a (private) repo with whatever file and pushing one random commit a day to it. There’s even a repo to automate this! In fact, I freely admit that a good portion of my contributions over the last year come from making small tweaks to my personal projects, including this very blog.¹ And this tweak was often as trivial as a simple npm update. How is that a contribution to anything, you may ask? It probably isn’t.

That said, I can also attest that the gamification of keeping that streak going often served me as a motivation to open up VS Code. And perhaps more importantly, it also led me to break any changes in code into small, “atomic” commits. While this started as an attempt to inflate the number of contributions for the day and feed my ego, I’d like to think that the habit of making small changes I built with this practice trained me to break any task into smaller, more manageable chunks.

So, what’s next? I will probably continue contributing to work projects and toying with personal projects on weekends, but I will stop making conscious efforts to not miss a day. There is more in life than that. Plus, although seeing that green field of GitHub contribution graph is truly satisfying, I now feel more confident in myself as a developer than I did about a year ago. No need for such an artificial proof that I’m capable, committed, or productive. Not anymore.

Footnotes

1. I was also lucky that I could add more GitHub contributions for my work projects. I almost lost many of them when I switched jobs, but found a way to restore them. ↩