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Ask HN: How to fix a demotivating GitHub timeline?

2 pointsby schafeleabout 4 years ago
Let&#x27;s assume you contribute to Open Source from time to time and take a look at your GitHub timeline which looks quite empty, such as this one [1]. Valuable contributions, but demotivating on a wall. This is quite bad because Open Source can also benefit from those contributors and it would be very nice to find a good way of visualising less contributions in a awesome looking and motivating graph. Any ideas for that?<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;ExlFmmTWEAIUP0J?format=jpg&amp;name=medium<p>Disclaimer&#x2F;Why do I ask this: I am one of the founders of https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeprints.dev and we sell custom prints of GitHub timelines. We encountered that many people are interested in our prints because they are also proud of their work. We got a lot of feedback that such a print can be very motivating. Unfortunately, if you have less contributions, the timeline looks quite empty and obviously, people don&#x27;t want to put empty prints on their walls.

1 comment

phendrenad2about 4 years ago
Maybe for people with spotty timelines, instead focus on the number of lines of code or something. Show the whole year as a pie chart, broken down by language, or framework, or something. Maybe show a wikipedia-style timeline view of contributions&#x2F;commits by the user. That way long gaps can be obscured, since your timeline doesn&#x27;t have to be perfectly linear.