A Commit a Day...
The Void
A few weeks ago (41 days at the time of writing) I became irritated by the large block of empty cells on my GitHub profile's contributions summary. I'd been half on vacation, and having working as a freelance web developer over the summer, resulting in nearly 2 months without a publicly-visible commit.
While I'd been committing to private repos every few days during that period, upon wrapping up my vacation I decided to try something different.
A Committment to Commit
Each and every day, I would write some code or content, and push it to my public GitHub account.
Why?
I was partly (mostly) inspired by this blog post I stumbled across: 177 Days of GitHub.
Like Ryan, I too found an interst in the formation of habits and routines, and was curious about the downstream or associated effects these habits might have on my overall approach to coding.
While Ryan had 3 conditions to keep himself from flaking out on the commit content, I distilled it down to pretty much just one:
- Submit actual stuff.
It doesn't have to be code, blog posts/website maintenance counts too, but I wanted to be sure that each of those little grids on the GitHub summary page actually represented some actual useful work.
Status Report
As I said, I'm 41 days in (this very post will bring it to 42), and I do think it has had a positive effect on both how much I produce and learn. Simply by helping to draw me to the laptop, the chain-of-commits is often all it takes to trigger a loop of reading -> learning -> implmenting. It also forces me to get a bit creative in figuring out what to work on next.
I'm under no illusions that my one condition, "Submit actual stuff", remains intact. There's been at least 2 days where "actual stuff" consisted of a couple lines of "blog post ideas", created and submitted in under 3 minutes. That said, there's still a bit of pride in finding those 3 minutes in a day when I'd otherwise be completely unplugged. The holiday season is certainly going to present a fresh set of challenges.