Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs • Hacker News Board

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#11

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:38 PM UTC

> 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?

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#12

Post by hueving » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:43 PM UTC

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #6

tmpz22 wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

Maybe for junior devs to get their foot in the door, but not for any higher level positions. You can't tell very much about someone's engineering skills based on some public commits to a side project and very few people (<1%) are writing open source professionally.

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#13

Post by glandium » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

drhodes wrote: post #5

ISL wrote: post #4

An 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.

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

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#14

Post by palferrari » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 9:52 PM UTC

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.

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#15

Post by eeZah7Ux » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

Shank wrote: post #2

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…

A software engineer's job is to solve a problem with the minimum amount of commits, lines of code and complexity as possible.

This obsession with commits as "contributions" is demeaning.

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#16

Post by bradknowles » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

paulie_a wrote: post #10

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So far.

Let's see how long that lasts.

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#17

Post by jessewmc » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

Shank wrote: post #2

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…

Reminds me of a project posted here a little while ago for exactly that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13552376

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#18

Post by jna_sh » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:22 PM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #15

Shank wrote: post #2

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…

A software engineer's job is to solve a problem with the minimum amount of commits, lines of code and complexity as possible. This obsession with commits as "contributions" is demeaning.

The contribution graph displays a lot more than just commits, for what it’s worth.

https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-yo...

“- Committing to a repository's default branch or gh-pages branch - Opening an issue - Proposing a pull request - Submitting a pull request review - Co-authoring commits in a repository's default branch or gh-pages branch”

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#19

Post by jna_sh » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:23 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #11

> 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?

What goes into the graph is documented here: https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-yo...

Re: Life as a GitHub Intern: What laser cutting taught me about contribution graphs

#20

Post by btlr » Thu, Jun 07, 2018, 10:30 PM UTC

tmpz22 wrote: post #3

Shank wrote: post #2

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…

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).

I frequently get emails from people who have skimmed my address from my profile (usually by looking through the stars or watchers of popular repos). I ended up setting my public email on GitHub to an alias so I could filter it out.