Github Spy

GitHub is an incredible tool to contribute and collaborate with everyone online. Central to GitHub is to follow others. See what they push, merge, and comment. All of these activities are broadcasted and one can gleam from the activity how productive or, in the absence of activity, how unproductive you are (this is a mere heuristic than absolute truth).

In March 2016, I founded and launched the (boot) Coding School in Mission, TX with the support of Texas Workforce Commission and Mission EDC. I developed the curriculum and taught for the past 3 months on Full Stack Web Development. Part of my mission with the course was to establish tools that will signal to the instructor if the students are performing. While studying and viewing videos are great tools to learn how to code, the proof is in the code. If you can push code, have your code reviewed, and you iteratively improve then you are on the path to becoming a software developer. Therefore, knowing when and how students were participating on GitHub became a top priority.

Github Spy is Born

You can review the code at github.com/ibolmo/github-spy.

Github Spy is just that: a script that runs periodically and reviews activity of the unwilling participant and publishes the activity/findings to an analytics engine. The spy is a simple Node.JS script that uses mikedeboer/node-github (GitHub API client) and keen/keen-tracking (Keen.IO JS client). Think of Keen.IO as Google Analytics for Developers. For ease of deployment, I chose to use RedHat’s OpenShift…