It's been ten years since. I looked at the heatmaps generated from my activity, and there were some interesting patterns. Really took me back. I realize that just going by the number of commits is a poor metric. Almost as poor as the number of lines of code for measuring code quality. But we've all got to start somewhere...
1. 2016 (46 commits)
At this time, I had just set up my GitHub account the previous year. The line chart of my contributions could be charitably described as "tentative".
Looking at the heatmap of my activity, the word that comes to mind is "sporadic". I used it a couple times a month, each time to commit a bunch of stuff.
Looks pitiful, eh? Basically I was just feeling my way around. Getting comfortable with the interface. There were even months where I had no activity whatsoever.
2. 2017 (96 commits)
The second year wasn't that much better, at least in terms of consistency. There were still a couple months where I failed to register any activity.
The line chart shows a marked improvement over the previous year. Though, to be fair, it's hard to do worse.
However, in the months where I did do shit, there was an uptick. Instead of a couple commits here and there, I was starting to register double digits on a semi-regular basis. This was definitely an improvement. Much of this could be attributed to me coding more ambitious projects. Projects that couldn't just be finished in a couple hours, and had to be periodically saved.
3. 2018 (179 commits)
This was the year one could practically see me shifting into third gear. There were no months where I neglected GitHub. More and more months were registering double digit commits. At the highest point at the end of the year, I even registered 50 commits. Compared to what I do consistently today, this is nothing. But it marked a start of something.
The trend line shows that I was still finding my feet, though some months were better than others. I was struggling for consistency as far as GitHub usage was concerned. This was at least partly due to me being busy studying for my ACTA.
Room for improvement? Definitely. But I was still using GitHub pretty much like a layperson. I used it to store code and not much else. I wasn't using GitHub anywhere close to its full potential.
4. 2019 (138 commits)
Things dropped off slightly in 2019. I suspect a lot of it was due to adjusting to my first year of being married and all. (Yeah, way to blame the wife, dude.)
My GitHub contribution was a jagged line. I would be a GitHub hero for a couple of months, then almost a zero the next month.
And in October, I even registered an entire month without a commit. This might have been due to the impending dominion of COVID-19. Suddenly we were all distracted by this potential life-or-death issue.
But for sure, my use of GitHub was still going strong, just not as strong as the previous year.
5. 2020 (286 commits)
This is where it started to get interesting. Some months, my usage climbed sharply, and plummeted just as quickly the next few months.
If you look at the heatmap below, it almost mirrors the line chart - periods of increased activity punctuated by periods of low activity. If there was any consolation, there were less fluctuations than the previous year.
This was because I was retroactively going through all my Readme files, and reformatting them for better readability. Also, now I was actually establishing proper code commits instead of merely updating via copy-pasting directly into repositories. I had GitHub Desktop open on my Lenovo, and open on my MacBook. This led to a whole lot of increased activity.
6. 2021 (227 commits)
This year, activity dropped off slightly, though my usage was arguably more consistent than it had been the previous year. The line chart shows a jagged line, though less jagged than previous years, with a peak near year end.
The heatmap of my activity was looking more spread out.
I was going through school for Data Analytics, and this affected the time I had for code experimentation. I'm proud to say, though, I managed to dedicate at least this much time.
7. 2022 (651 commits)
This was the year my usage really started to take off. For one, I was really seriously beginning to commit code the way GitHub was meant to be used. The lowest number of commits I tracked was 34 in January, and it never fell below that number for the rest of the year. The highest at one point was 76 in March. The line chart still shows a jagged line, but the minimum has risen dramatically.
The heatmap shows an ever wider spread of contributions over the year. A whole lot more heat. Almost three times the previous year's.
I had also begun to manage the contents of the website on GitHub, under a private repository. This was so I could look up previous versions of files and potentially restore them. I really should have done this a lot sooner. The thing was, my Lenovo was beginning to sputter and I really didn't feel comfortable having all my content stored there. Thus, my hand was forced.
That was pretty much how the number of commits jumped that much.
8. 2023 (872 commits)
The number of commits continued to jump. Compared to the peals and valleys registered in previous years for monthly commits, it was a relatively straight, consistent line.
I had begun to use GitHub to store my blogging drafts. Now this may not sound like much, until one considers how I blog. It starts as a skeleton made out of ideas in point form, and slowly I flesh them out bit by bit. Along the way, I may make revisions - rewording and rearranging stuff. I may only have over 70 blogposts a year, but that's multiple commits per blogpost!
This was partly due to my Lenovo being on its last legs. I began the process of writing drafts in GitHub instead of storing them in text files in my Lenovo, and when my Lenovo finally died in the latter half of 2023, my caution was rewarded.
The end result was, there were only three dates in the entire year where I didn't register a single commit. Compared to last year, the number of commits in a single month ranged from 61 to 80. In the heatmap, you can see that almost the entire map is shades of green.
9. 2024 (991 commits)
Now that I was writing drafts in GitHub full-time, that translated to daily commits. I would get an idea, open up GitHub, and commit it. I registered maybe one or two dates the entire year where I didn't commit anything. Most of the time, though, I was supremely consistent. If you look at the graph, the line was even smoother than the previous year's!
Looking at the chart, my usage started out at 70 plus commits per month, then steadily climbed to the high 80s through the course of the year. I remember at that point trying to rein myself in. I didn't want to end up setting a bar I couldn't commit to long term. The heatmap, as in 2024, shows almost total coverage of shades of green, but a lot more is bright green.
In addition to that, some of my projects were a little complex. They required frequent commits. I could push ten commits in an hour on a ReactJS project. This was also the year I started with NodeJS, and as you can probably tell, this also translated to a lot of commits.
10. 2025 (1007 commits)
The trend continued. I was hitting my stride in my usage of GitHub, and the consistency was really starting to show. Commits per month were now in the 80 plus range, until near the end of the year where I decided to give myself a bit of breathing room. Looking at the trend line, it was almost a straight line except for that year-end dip.
In the case of blogpost drafts, sometimes my updates were just little typo corrections and adding a few sentences here and there. Most bloggers will tell you that the incremental nature of writing a blogpost means that potentially a whole bunch of corrections accompany every one. While this was already the case in previous years, I took it up a few notches.
Here, the heatmap shows an entire year with no gaps. There is obviously higher usage during weekends. Of course, one commit could be as small as correcting a single typo, or be as big as including new functions into the code base. Thus, it can't be a complete representation of how hard I work here. But it's a decent indication.
What a decade!
It's interesting to me how my usage of GitHub evolved through the years. From just another online file system to a means of tracking code changes, and from there expanding to tracking all document changes. Even with code, my usage also changed, with more frequent commits due to establishing CI/CD pipelines.Most of all, I think it shows my growth as a techie. My usage could still be improved, but at this point I think I'm getting close to a sweet spot. What has your usage been like?
With much commitment,
T___T
T___T
