50 shades of green

Update: The streak has reached 100, read more about the additional projects I was working on here

Alright, four shades. Making 50 squares.

Yep, that's right, my GitHub commit streak reached 50 days!

What's GitHub? What's a GitHub commit streak?

Meow

For the uninitiated, GitHub is an online service that lets you efficiently manage repositories of code using the git protocol. Besides allowing for easy version control and collaboration on code (which are just features of the git protocol), it provides a bunch of useful collaboration tools like the issue tracker, and nifty features like pull requests. Most code hosted on GitHub is open source.

I keep most of my code on GitHub because

• I can access my code from anywhere and make changes
• I can use git without having to set up a bare repository on a remote server every time
• It's open source, and I don't have to deal with the hassles of keeping it up to date elsewhere
• It's pretty easy for others to report issues on it
• It's easy for others to submit their own patches to the code via the pull request feature. I can also add collaborators with minimal hassle.

When using Git, a "commit" is basically a bundle of changes to the code, which can later be pulled/pushed between servers. On GitHub, if you've been committing code for a number of days in a row, it's called a "commit streak", and is showed on the profile. Days with relatively more commits are shown as a darker shade of green on the punchcard.

How I got started

Initially I didn't have any intention of maintaining a commit streak. Near the end of December, I was working on both Charcoal and HostelNoticeboard, and after a week and a half of constantly committing code, I noticed that I had a commit streak going. Naturally, I was pretty happy and wanted to extend this.

I first set up some ground rules, inspired by Ryan Seys:

• Issues don't count
• Edits to READMEs don't count
• Edits to non-code files like GitHub Pages files do count.
• No scripting commits; and push code the day you write it unless it's half written
• No playing with local commit times

I also identified repositories and mini-projects that I needed to work on beforehand. This actually got some of my backburner'ed ideas out of the woodwork; some of which I actually implemented.

The journey

Initially I found it challenging to commit code every day. I had a lot of other commitments (ha!) in life and didn't want to impinge on my academics. Usually it takes a bit of time to get warmed up before coding; one has to evaluate the situation and figure out what needs to be done. This, along with debugging, takes up quite a bit of time.

However, as time passed, I got more and more efficient at this so that I could spend more time writing real code. At the same time, maintaining the commit streak became a habit. I used to always have a terminal tab open for my cloned repositories, and would be hacking away every now and then.

Sticking to an agenda becomes natural after a point

There were some days when I thought that I would be too busy to code, and would instead make some minor changes to fill in the punchcard for that day. Almost every time, I ended up unexpectedly making more substantial contributions the same day. There were also some days when I would open the site, in a panic that I forgot to code that day; and it would turn out that I had committed code, just forgotten about it. I guess that's the first sign of madness, but who cares?

Use GitHub for your academics, too!

As exam time neared, I had to switch strategies. I always had planned to put up my LaTeX documents (notes, presentations, assignments) on GitHub, making it easier for me to share them, keep them up to date, and incorporate improvements. Till then I had been using scripts to upload them to my university homepage. Which wasn't as efficient.

So I created CourseResources, and uploaded all the old documents I could find. Since I would be writing notes or assignments regularly, this provided a steady source of commits (also, a second motivation to study!) that helped me when I was too busy to write proper code. I still tried not to rely on this for the streak, though. The goal is to consolidate as many LaTeX notes as possible here; the repo is under an organization for easy collaboration. 

Where it's at now

So, in the past 50 days, the new projects I created are:

• Kapi, a Metro note-taking app with fluid math support. Made it for a hackathon, plan to continue working on it.
• IIT-Timetable, a webpage that lets one easily construct and share a printable semester timetable without having to worry too much about the complicated slot pattern. While there are plans to extend this, the app is complete in itself.
• ChatExchange, a python wrapper for Stack Exchange Chat. Currently it has basic read/write functionality, but needs a lot of polishing. I also created multiple projects that use this as a submodule:
• StackExchange-ChatBot: A python class that can be used to easily create a chatbot that can react to various commands. I created this today, and it doesn't do much yet but gives an idea of the basic structure.
• SmokeDetector: A bot that monitors the Stack Exchange realtime feed and links to possible spam or otherwise low quality posts in a couple of chatrooms so that it can be dealt with quickly. This was intended to solve the issue of spam lying around on low-activity sites if the moderators aren't around at that moment. The bot is currently running, though I make tweaks to the algorithm every now and then.
• ChatExchange-Scripts: A couple of random scripts created as proof-of-concepts.
• CourseResources (both the CourseResources and Slides repos): As mentioned before, contains all my LaTeXed documents. Feel free to pull request and add your own.
• daemonic-mach, a project to integrate inotify or watchman with Mozilla's mach build program to speed up build time. This is just a placeholder for now, I haven't yet gotten around to starting this. First commits don't count for a streak unless there are subsequent commits, so this didn't add to the streak.
• ECMAScript6-tester, a script that loads dummy versions of proposed ES6 features into the document and reports compatibility of the document with these features. Intended to prevent naming collisions (like this one) where a prototype extension clashes with a new feature, breaking things. This repo is another placeholder.

Look at all this code I wrote!

In addition, I worked on the following preexisting projects (not necessarily my projects):

• Charcoal, a webapp that lets one easily collect and flag noisy content (mainly comments) from Stack Exchange sites. I mainly dealt with the JS code in this.
• HostelNoticeboard, the code (both Pi-side and server-side) for the Electronic Noticeboard project in IIT. I've written the Pi-side code and a portion of the server-side stuff. The code works and is currently deployed, on a single Pi with the online interface here. There are a bunch of improvements on the roadmap that I mean to get to in a few weeks.
• waca: The Wikipedia Account Request System, running here. I usually do small bugfixes.
• wncc.github.io: The Web & Coding club website, running here. I add posts and sometimes make changes to the Jekyll code.
• Manish-Codes, random userscripts and things which I write.

All in all, plenty of code written, lots of work done :D

Where it's going to go

I really don't know how long I'll be able to keep this up. Academics do get in the way, and while I can do minor changes every day, that's not too productive. However, it's giving me a driving motivation to get all my backburner'ed projects finished, which is great! It's also taught me a lot about planning and I got a  good chance to hone my coding skills.

These 50 days have been really fun, though, and I hope I'll be able to keep it up as long as possible :)

Hope I get the time!

Octocats taken from the Octodex