Making Your Github Green Again
When I open somebody’s Github profile, the first thing I look for is avatar. It’s a natural desire to see a face of the person you are meeting, it’s like looking into eyes when introducing yourself. The second thing my eye lies on is contribution graph. I know that contribution graph is not informative at all, but it’s right there, it’s lavishly green or monochromly grey, and it’s so visual I cannot avert my sight from it.
Do developers care about the contribution graph?
I think in general they don’t. Certainly, the bootcamp grads, aspiring devs, and anybody looking for an internship or junior position, will try to commit as much as they can to show off their work and effort and commitment. But most of the experienced employed developers work with private repos so no commits are shown on their public profiles.
Do hiring managers care about the contribution graph?
I hope they don’t. The contribution graph is not a tool to assess developer’s qualification by any means. As mentioned above, the private repo commits are not shown on it, commits to master branch do not count too. So I do hope hiring managers understand it. If they don’t, they are not the hiring managers I want to work with.
So who cares about the contribution graph anyway?
One simple answer to this question is nerdy people who are focused on their strikes, or strides, or 100 days of code challenges, or whatever they call it.
Another more interesting answer is artistic souls who try to create 8-bit art even when limited to only 7 rows, 53 colums, and several shades of green.
Just look at these graphs, aren’t they masterpieces?
Creating any kind of image on your contribution graph is very challenging because not only it requires Superman’s commitment to the task, but a precise calculation of the amount of commits needed to achieve the exact shade of green you want.
If only we could commit with past dates so we could ‘replay’ that one missed day…
Oh wait, we certainly can!
And in order to do that you don’t have to change the time in bash before commiting. Just one simple git command has it all covered for you!
git commit --date “Fri Feb 16 14:00 2018 +0100”Just run this command changing the date to the one you need. After running it you’ll be prompted to enter the commit message. If your editor is Vim, type the message, then press Esc to exit the insertion mode, and type :wq to save message and exit the editor. Then just push your commit to the repo as usual.
And show me your beautiful graphs, people!
