I'd love to see GitHub selling physical tokens that measure this. She did a fantastic job with this project -- but applying it to a commercial side as part of the shop would be cool. I'm not sure how well anything like this can scale, though.
I'd also like to see more exploration beyond the contribution graph for measuring impact. I know it's not perfect, but it is neat.
I'm a bit sad they removed the "punch card" in the projects statistic.
This was a great tool to see if a project was a side project from a lone individual or something with people paid to work on it daily from 9am to 6pm.
(I tend to prefer the second in my choice of dependencies, because there are less likely to be abandoned).
This obsession with commits as "contributions" is demeaning.
https://help.github.com/articles/viewing-contributions-on-yo...
“- Committing to a repository's default branch or gh-pages branch - Opening an issue - Proposing a pull request - Submitting a pull request review - Co-authoring commits in a repository's default branch or gh-pages branch”
To hook in on the rest of the debate. It might not be the best measure to qualitatively or even quantitatively compare developer contributions. But a physical token as memento would definitely be an awesome way to be thanked for contributing to a project instead of the old buy-me-a-coffee-button.
But what I found was very neat about the contribution graph, and why I was so disappointed they removed the streak counts, was it was a good self-motivational tool. As a hobbyist coder, having an encouragement to keep a streak going by looking at code (either mine, or someone else's), and try to improve it in some way on a daily basis was a really good push for me.
I think it's obvious from my full contribution graph (visible at https://github-contributions.now.sh/ under my username) where I was using the contribution graph/streaks to encourage me to contribute more in late 2015 and early 2016, and you can see how much it fell off when they removed the streak count in May of 2016.
Which is to say, healthily used, you can be honest with yourself and use it to encourage yourself to continue participating, but obviously, it's bad as a metric of how much a person codes in general.
Just use the date parameter of the git commit command: git commit --date "Foo Jan 1 00:00:01 CEST 2011" -m "What".
I wonder if people "game" the system here (since apparently it's an important metric). For example, you could split a commit in two ...
Something fun I did with the contribution graph a couple of years ago. Lets you play Conway's Game of Life (sort of) with the graph. More crowded contribution graphs make for slightly less interesting generations. You can enable/disable cells if you'd like.
Is there no API for contribution graphs, or formula that GitHub uses to generate these based on previous activity?
