I've wanted this for a very long time. I'm in search of a summer internship, so I've been hoping for a way for potential employers to quickly see what I've been working on. Not just my own projects, but also my pull requests to other projects.
Thumbs up for GitHub, this is a welcomed feature. Very attractive, too.
Indeed. It used to be that the only way to glean such information (for an arbitrary user) would be to crawl all the projects and sift through the data yourself.
I'm hoping that they make this info available through the API, and allow us to see contributions over all time, instead of just in the last year / month.
Even more so. The majority of my work is in organizations. Before it was difficult to see what I was doing. Unless someone is really interested in my emacs settings.
Wow this is great GitHub. One of my fave features so far. It was always a pain to see my most popular repositories and to view the repos that I have contributed to!
Very cool! I used calendaraboutnothing /extensively/ - it was a hugely important motivational tool for me.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this counts contributions to non-master branches? I work mostly in branches and my calenderaboutnothing streaks were much longer.
Your commits will count for the day they were committed once they're merged to master. i.e., It's the date on the commit that matters, not the date it's eventually pushed to master. A little weird since it means past days can fill in later but we wanted to make sure they were counted.
What is this calendaraboutnothing of which you speak? Google wasn't very helpful here. I'm looking for a "streak-based calendar/motivational tool", and I gather that's what you are talking about.
Hm, I'm divided on this. It's cool to be able to see what someone works most on... But at the same time, there's the privacy concern of being able to see what someone works most on. I'd like the ability to turn it off—hell, you can already decide what repos you expose to the public, so why not activity?
Of course, I realize that your activity on GitHub is public anyway—but it's never been so obvious.
> If you visit your "contributions" page while you are logged out, you will notice that all non-public activity is hidden.
This wasn't immediately clear to me, so I had to test it out with Incognito. As it is, my own view of my profile is dominated by repositories from my prior business for which I no longer have access to on GitHub.
In general, I'd really prefer to be able to see my public profile. I guess it makes sense to let people know how much I contribute privately, but I want to be able to audit my public persona in much the same way Facebook has "View Profile As ____".
Maybe just a simple "View Public?" checkbox on the page itself would do. I agree - I have to check incognito if I want to see what I've actually done the most work on that everyone sees.
you are right to be concerned tho - despite the data originally being public, a collected view of public data (that wasn't easy to collect previously) can give new information.
The best way to solve this is if via some sort of toggle to turn off the view. Or, with more engineering effort, toggle each individual contributions that you don't want in the collated view.
I don't know whether I'm pleased that it hides my private activity or whether -- because almost all my activity is in private repos -- to be upset by that :D
Maybe because it could draw unwanted attention of the presses - you want bloggers to write about awesome new feature, not about the potential implications of a hidden switch and what would happen if it's default state was different. It's easier to roll out such changes after people are already accustomed with the general idea.
Sounds dangerous - I don't think my employer would be okay with me exposing how frequently I contribute to our repositories, not due to any crazy paranoia but simply because they haven't thought about the potential outcomes or abuses yet.
To add this feature, GitHub would probably additionally have to add the ability to disable it on an organizational basis, and and that point a simple-sounding feature is transformed to a pointy-haired-boss "organizational matrix" level of potentially conflicting settings.
True, I guess I am thinking more from a personal interest perspective, like you would glance down a rescue time breakdown, rather than a telling the world. So one possibility would be to have your personal profile view show both.
As a fanatical user of calendaraboutnothing in the past, I'm stoked to see the streak graph on the profile page. As others have mentioned, it can be extremely motivating!
However, I really don't care for most of my popular repos or some of the external ones I've contributed to. My ideal would be to hide repos that I don't care about and to highlight the ones that I want to showcase.
The "Contribution Activity" stuff is totally fine, but given how much the public repos reflect the "personality" of an individual, I am a little saddened that it's being lost in the sea of popularity. It'd be nice to be able to reclaim some control over that.
Edit: To clarify, two of my popular repos with a few hundred watchers between them are efforts I spent all of a few evenings on. I am as proud of them as some notes I scribbled last week. In contrast, I have repos which I've poured months of effort into which I would rather highlight.
Likewise, one of the repos to which I recently contributed is of such subpar quality that I'd rather not be publicly associated with it so prominently. Whilst I'm happy to help others out, knowing that it'd be displayed in such a prominent manner acts as an anti-incentive to partake in low quality projects.
So, if any GitHubbers are listening... please replace "Popular Repositories" with "Highlighted Repositories" and give us more control over what gets displayed with regards repos we've contributed to. And, oh, whilst I'm at it, perhaps "Most Recent Streak" would be more motivating than "Current Streak" which I imagine would be at an awe-inspiring 0 for many of us way too often.
Github really needs a "deprecated" flag for repositories (maybe it has one already? I don't know of one). This wouldn't solve your specific issue with the weekend projects (assuming the code is still serviceable), but would really help the signal-to-noise ratios in these lists and on other areas of the site.
> And, oh, whilst I'm at it, perhaps "Most Recent Streak" would be more motivating than "Current Streak" which I imagine would be at an awe-inspiring 0 for many of us way too often.
Not to mention, give it a day of leeway. I pushed code yesterday, but none yet today (it's still first thing) and my streak is 0.
It's interesting to see where GitHub is heading these days. The combination of software collaboration and showcasing projects / recruiter friendly profile pages is pretty compelling...
I love the idea of Github as a resume, and this is easily one of the best features that push it in that direction. It allows for a quick glance at what an author contributes the most to, which can be a quick way of identifying the most successful projects they work on.
It really fixes the problem that organizations always had of visibility. My commits to an org repo usually weren't visible on profile except in the feed and as a link to the organization. This is a big improvement.
I love this. I was not crazy about some of the changes Github had been making lately, but this is great! Way easier to see what someone has done at a quick glance vs having to scroll through a long list of repos.
The only thing I would suggest is like @tav said. They should change "Popular repositories" to "Featured repositories" and give users the option to edit the list. It could offer sort options (show 5 most recently active, show 5 most popular, show 5 most recently created) and also give an option to manually select which 5 to showcase and put them in a specific order.
In my case popularity works fine, but considering this is a way to showcase yourself offering some additional control is not the end of the world in my opinion.
Agreed - it's great to see what people have been contributing to and working on - but the number of commits and days in a row with a commit seem like meaningless data.
Well, measuring the quality of commits is an AI-complete task, so we need some proxies. Number of commits seems to encourage more small commits, which AFAIR is what is preferred in Git. Days in a row is an old "don't break the chain" trick.
> Streak? C'mon, what is this, Xbox Live?
Most likely, yes. I guess it's not about what that data means, it's more about what it does to you. I dread to use this word, but it's gamification.
There's a repo that I am co-own, but since it was originally created by my colleague, it's shows up as he's the owner. Wish there was a way to make a repo equally credited on multiple profiles..
As someone that's been working to wrap my head around how to work with and develop d3.js visualizations, this provides a great example of what's possible. Looks good, and the source definitely gives me a few things to investigate!
That's an interesting visualization of every day in the year. Anybody know if there is a standard name for them and/or any good tools for generating them in JS?
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadThumbs up for GitHub, this is a welcomed feature. Very attractive, too.
I'm hoping that they make this info available through the API, and allow us to see contributions over all time, instead of just in the last year / month.
Also, damn, the disparity between my public and private profile is huge. Imma gonna commit more to open source!
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this counts contributions to non-master branches? I work mostly in branches and my calenderaboutnothing streaks were much longer.
Of course, I realize that your activity on GitHub is public anyway—but it's never been so obvious.
I feel that you've raised a valid concern -- for the sake of privacy it would be best to have the option to deactivate this feature.
This wasn't immediately clear to me, so I had to test it out with Incognito. As it is, my own view of my profile is dominated by repositories from my prior business for which I no longer have access to on GitHub.
In general, I'd really prefer to be able to see my public profile. I guess it makes sense to let people know how much I contribute privately, but I want to be able to audit my public persona in much the same way Facebook has "View Profile As ____".
The best way to solve this is if via some sort of toggle to turn off the view. Or, with more engineering effort, toggle each individual contributions that you don't want in the collated view.
"Can I program and work in a team? am I active? Check out my github profile"
Anyhow. Very pretty.
To add this feature, GitHub would probably additionally have to add the ability to disable it on an organizational basis, and and that point a simple-sounding feature is transformed to a pointy-haired-boss "organizational matrix" level of potentially conflicting settings.
Easy fix: the owner of the repository (ie, the organization) can {en,dis}able the feature per-repo.
However, I really don't care for most of my popular repos or some of the external ones I've contributed to. My ideal would be to hide repos that I don't care about and to highlight the ones that I want to showcase.
The "Contribution Activity" stuff is totally fine, but given how much the public repos reflect the "personality" of an individual, I am a little saddened that it's being lost in the sea of popularity. It'd be nice to be able to reclaim some control over that.
Edit: To clarify, two of my popular repos with a few hundred watchers between them are efforts I spent all of a few evenings on. I am as proud of them as some notes I scribbled last week. In contrast, I have repos which I've poured months of effort into which I would rather highlight.
Likewise, one of the repos to which I recently contributed is of such subpar quality that I'd rather not be publicly associated with it so prominently. Whilst I'm happy to help others out, knowing that it'd be displayed in such a prominent manner acts as an anti-incentive to partake in low quality projects.
So, if any GitHubbers are listening... please replace "Popular Repositories" with "Highlighted Repositories" and give us more control over what gets displayed with regards repos we've contributed to. And, oh, whilst I'm at it, perhaps "Most Recent Streak" would be more motivating than "Current Streak" which I imagine would be at an awe-inspiring 0 for many of us way too often.
Not to mention, give it a day of leeway. I pushed code yesterday, but none yet today (it's still first thing) and my streak is 0.
(Admittedly, I need to get around to deleting them, too.)
It really fixes the problem that organizations always had of visibility. My commits to an org repo usually weren't visible on profile except in the feed and as a link to the organization. This is a big improvement.
The only thing I would suggest is like @tav said. They should change "Popular repositories" to "Featured repositories" and give users the option to edit the list. It could offer sort options (show 5 most recently active, show 5 most popular, show 5 most recently created) and also give an option to manually select which 5 to showcase and put them in a specific order.
In my case popularity works fine, but considering this is a way to showcase yourself offering some additional control is not the end of the world in my opinion.
I don't like their idea of "sharing".
Not all commits are created equal and I don't find this new 'contributions' calendar/graph at all useful.
You still cannot get a good snapshot of contributions for users that are members of organizations.
> Streak? C'mon, what is this, Xbox Live?
Most likely, yes. I guess it's not about what that data means, it's more about what it does to you. I dread to use this word, but it's gamification.
Which is the problem. I already enjoy writing code, and I don't need it to be gamified in order to give me an incentive to do so.
Worse, gamifying it skews the incentives, reducing overall code quality in the process.
Layout inspired by Rick Wicklin and Robert Allison (http://stat-computing.org/dataexpo/2009/posters/)