Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs
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Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs
#2I 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.
Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs
#3I 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…
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).
Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs
#4An aside: the contribution graph can be gamed:
Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs
#5An aside: the contribution graph can be gamed: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
On a more mundane note, they also don't track commits on forked repos.
Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs
#6I 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…
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).
Github is already essentially Linkedin for developers.
Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs
#7An aside: the contribution graph can be gamed: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
Your contribution graph should never be assumed to be an authoritative statement on your activity, and for sure, you can have dozens of typo correction PRs on a day versus another person's major feature, and the typos look like you did "more".
But what I found was very neat about the contribution graph, and why I was so disappointed they removed the streak counts, was it was a good self-motivational tool. As a hobbyist coder, having an encouragement to keep a streak going by looking at code (either mine, or someone else's), and try to improve it in some way on a daily basis was a really good push for me.
I think it's obvious from my full contribution graph (visible at https://github-contributions.now.sh/ under my username) where I was using the contribution graph/streaks to encourage me to contribute more in late 2015 and early 2016, and you can see how much it fell off when they removed the streak count in May of 2016.
Which is to say, healthily used, you can be honest with yourself and use it to encourage yourself to continue participating, but obviously, it's bad as a metric of how much a person codes in general.
Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs
#8I 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…
Another thing that would make an interesting souvenir, I think, would be if you could figure out how to condense the fork graph into something that fit on a T-shirt or something somehow. It's pretty interesting how unique that graph can look based on how different PRs were developed and merged over time.
Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Github is already essentially Linkedin for developers.
Yea but unlike LinkedIn people don't put their entire resume and a litany of other personal info on the front page. Yes your resume website might be in your github, but the exposure is much more intentional.
Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Github is already essentially Linkedin for developers.
Except GitHub doesn't steal your contact list and then send fraudulent notifications to them like LinkedIn does.