Aug 31 2014

Thoughts on GitHub streaking

Thought it might be a good idea to brain dump on my thoughts of “Write Code Everyday” and more to the point the github challenge,

The general gist of what I have found after “streaking” so long is that as long as you have a project on your hands its fine and that the “code will just come to you”, but its also a really good way to get burned out and just sick of computers entirely really quickly, esp if you are already in a full time job. Though doing the streak has brought me a great deal of learning and a hell of a lot of motivation to just “get shit done” it has also left me generally exhausted (Hence why I stopped on Friday, Left it at 256 days)

I would still recommend others to try and do this however, since its great fun, and even more fun if you have a paid github account, since what I ended up doing was working on a private repo, and then because I was afraid to break streak at any point I would also push something useful to a public one, meaning a lot of my older repo’s got some work done on them in just making them easier.

Another thing I noticed is that the colour intensity at least for me is entirely worthless, Since I can do a huge amount of little commits in under a hour, and yet spend a whole day working on just one for a larger project, I end up with a generally very pale streak (though if you are just doing this for the pretty graph on github then you might be doing it wrong)

Overall, I really do think everyone should try this, It is a ton of fun, and gets you a good public profile.

tl;dr Try and code everyday (Habits are hard, but after 30-40 days it just “happens”) and also learn when to take breaks, Don’t do what I just did and got sick of computers.