Daily Contributions

Lets light up that contribution chart

The first thing anyone notices when looking at a GitHub profile is the user’s activity. Its big. Its (relatively) colorful. Its visually interesting. And at minimum, it shows how often this user is doing some form of software contribution*

*contribution ON GITHUB. Some of my friends who are crazy active on their own will end up with blank activity graphs because they do it all locally.

So, while the correlation isnt perfect, theres no denying that a recruiter looking at this chart will only see good things if its lit up. I’m not the first person to notice this, and there are several thinkpieces saying the same thing. There are also tools that can take advantage of this metric.

However, I think it will just be personally beneficial to start making commits once a day, if i can. Its the same thing as making sure to get on the treadmill or something for even just 10 minutes. That small amount of activity is better than nothing. Even if I’m just updating a README, adding comments, cleaning up a notes file, or fixing a small bug, doing something once a day keeps it fresh in my mind.

Of course, some days it will slip my mind, or I’ll be too busy doing other things in the breaks between assignments. Thats fine. This isn’t the end of the world. Its just something to think about when moving forward. In fact, working on my CS 307 semester project is counted on the contribution graph, so theres a chance it’ll still help fill that out.

“Well, you’re just coding to intentionally meet some arbitrary metric. Aren’t you misrepresenting how much you actually code by spreading it thinner across time?”

I don’t think that spreading out programming means anything at all. I still have my 6 hour manic coding sessions, and even those might just look like one commit at the end of the night. I think my points above demonstrate that as long as I stay mindful about why im setting a goal like this, it will help my growth. Theres no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to bettering yourself, and more of a “whatever works” approach feels healthy.

Hey, even writing this blog post counts!