Commitment and Github, 1 Year of Commits

Today marks an achievement for me. Exactly one year ago I got a crazy notion in my head. Why not try to commit something everyday for an entire year?. At the time, I had no idea if I could do it or not, and had only accidently had a github streak for about 2 weeks or so tops. While I didn't know which projects I'd work on, I figure'd tech changes so much that it's not hard to find something new to blog about, or to experiment with.

Since that day one year ago I've made quite a few contributions to the tech community. For example, way back in February I contributed to notwaldorf's shrinkwrap project the ability to edit T-Shirt Sizing cards. For a short time I was actively writing blog posts about macros in HarpJS and enhancements like RSS with Harp. Outside of writing about Harp, I was creating chrome extensions and twitter apps for use by internet activists.

While I was mostly content to stay in my own corner of the internet this year, I did reach out open source projects, and one even reached out to me. Which was a fantastic way to start a day. But really, contributing to the tech community at large is a great feeling, and I sometimes wonder if people don't always do it because they think a contribution has to be large. That's not always the case. A simple performance test can provide good metrics for scaling that other developers can use to test their own improvements. No matter how small, even if it's just documentation it can be helpful.

That's not to say I was coding everyday. If I were to look through all my commits I'd probably find that most of them weren't actually code. (this is mainly because my code commits are in private repositories for work and such) My github streak primarily consists of writing. From technical blog posts on everything from python string performance, how to use strace to debug, or even touching on education, I wrote a lot this year. Sometimes about the newest cheap recipe I've come up with. Sometimes just looking at some weird laws, it's fun to write about the world around me.

And that's primarily what I do with the biggest contributions to my github streak. I've written ~73 narrations, ~105 poems, and ~84 tech posts this year. Writing has become an enjoyable hobby for me, whether it's just venting out about hypocrites, or reminding myself that people are people and we're just one humanity, poetry and prose is really fun. Writing short stories and small segments about people's lives I see or just running with whatever inspires me is a great way to start my mornings. Because I take the bus to work, I almost always have some small piece of human interaction that can spark a story, there's so many people out there, and so many emotions people can feel, it's nearly endless what you can write about. And I don't really plan on stopping anytime soon.

Currently, I'm working in scala a lot, and redoing my expense tracking software. I always try to have at least one side project going on at a time that's related to code, and this year I'm going to add a writing project on the side as well. While I won't link it yet, I've decided to put my smut writing to good use and write a book. While I don't know how long it will take me, or even what I'll do with it when I'm done, I figure it will be fun to take a step back from writing shorter pieces, and focus on a longer and more complex work. I'm not sure if I'll be as obsessed with keeping my streak going or not (did I mention I traveled outside the country this year and brought my laptop along explicitly to write and keep my streak going? Or that I coded an entire javascript experiment at the airport on a smartphone?*). But no matter what, I'll try to contribute to open source libraries I use, and I'd encourage everyone else to do so as well.

*Coding any language with symbols really sucks on a smartphone by the way