My Seinfeld Calendar

The last few weeks I’ve had a bit more spare time than I usually have so I have been coding away, learning new Android tricks, setting up GitHub and seriously working with git for the first time.

I had heard from Gina Trapani — can’t remember from what podcast but I think it was on In Beta — that GitHub had released something they called Contributions.

Today we’re happy to release Contributions: a new addition to profile pages that lets you see what everyone has been up to on GitHub.

Doesn’t really sound like much. But it is.

As Wired wrote this was something comedian Jerry Seinfeld came up with:

Seinfeld told him the best way to write better jokes was to write every day, as Issac recalled years later on the blog Lifehacker. To maintain the habit, Seinfeld told Issac, he should buy one of those big wall calendars that has the entire year printed on it and hang it in a prominent place. Each day you write, Seinfeld explained, you put a big red “X” on the day, and pretty soon, you’ll have a big chain of red X’s.

“Don’t break the chain,” he said.

Now that I’ve had some experience with this I can say that it really works for me. It’s sort of like a competition with myself, kind a like the same way I compete with myself on RunKeeper. I want to keep improving and I want to keep running.

It’s a drug. And I like it ;)

(Originally published 2013–03–14)