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GitHub activity graphs are meaningless

Rob Kendal {{☕}} on May 29, 2020

If you'd like to see more content like this 😍, we should definitely connect on Twitter! 🤝. Take a look at my Twitter profile and I'll look forward ...
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Clément Corbin

This one graph doesn't look meaningless to me: github.com/CCorbinBot?tab=overview... ;)
Great article though, I absolutely agree with most of it and have never understood all the fuss about this activity graph...

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Rob Kendal {{☕}}

haha that's amazing!

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Senik Hakobyan

You can push 100 commits daily to some project that is being released once in a year ( yes, I know that kind of project ). And the graph won’t show your activity because you do those commits for the next release and probably not to the default branch.
Meaningless.

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Viren B

Nice article, I agree with it. As someone looking for my first dev job, I try to keep my GH activity up as I heard some hiring managers look at it. I think the culture should definitely change.

Work on projects, try to find an open source project, making meaningful commits! Not just for the sake of keeping your graph green.

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Rob Kendal {{☕}}

Thanks for your thoughts Viren, and it must be stressful having to have that mindset because of, frankly, bad hiring managers. Coloured squares !== your value :D

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Manda Putra

github.com/mazipan/auto-commit do it for free with these.

Also, you don't had to make meaning full commits. Just make flow on your pace ~ you had a nice blog though keep it up! :D

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Keff

Nice post, a topic that has not been talked much, but is really important IMHO. It can be really harmful to junior and developers that are starting out... I've been a bit of a victim to that myself but came to the conclusion that it's my code and personality that is worth something (as you pointed out), not a graph or number of commits I make...

I always thought it is better to make 2 worthy commits, than 20 that holds almost no value at all.

I recall reading some kind of post or something about this back in the day, I will try finding it.

For me, that tweet graph is sign of an unhealthy individual, more than a productive or "buffed" developer, I'm almost certain they push useless commits and probably buggy code, just to get that green square on Sundays... unhealthy for the developer and for the code. Some people don't even rest when they have holidays :(

PD: I found the post, it was a GitHub issue over at isaacs/github repo, can be found here. There is quite a conversation over there, worth reading.

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Rob Kendal {{☕}}

Nice Manolo, thanks for the link and your thoughts on it. I agree 100%

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Paweł Kowalski

TBH nothing can measure

Your personality
Your level or breadth of knowledge
Your experience(s)
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Rob Kendal {{☕}}

Darn straight!

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Michiel Hendriks

The job of programmers is to solve problems. Not to write code.

Sometimes solving a problem takes 5 days of thinking and 1 line of code.

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Rob Kendal {{☕}}

Well said that man and totally right. Least that's how my weeks feel :D

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Keff

Another thing to consider, it can be easily modified using something like github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti/issu...

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Rob Kendal {{☕}}

Quality FTW!