Introducing Contributions

As a fanatical user of calendaraboutnothing in the past, I'm stoked to see the streak graph on the profile page. As others have mentioned, it can be extremely motivating!<p>However, I really don't care for most of my popular repos or some of the external ones I've contributed to. My ideal would be to hide repos that I don't care about and to highlight the ones that I want to showcase.<p>The "Contribution Activity" stuff is totally fine, but given how much the public repos reflect the "personality" of an individual, I am a little saddened that it's being lost in the sea of popularity. It'd be nice to be able to reclaim some control over that.<p>Edit: To clarify, two of my popular repos with a few hundred watchers between them are efforts I spent all of a few evenings on. I am as proud of them as some notes I scribbled last week. In contrast, I have repos which I've poured months of effort into which I would rather highlight.<p>Likewise, one of the repos to which I recently contributed is of such subpar quality that I'd rather not be publicly associated with it so prominently. Whilst I'm happy to help others out, knowing that it'd be displayed in such a prominent manner acts as an anti-incentive to partake in low quality projects.<p>So, if any GitHubbers are listening... please replace "Popular Repositories" with "Highlighted Repositories" and give us more control over what gets displayed with regards repos we've contributed to. And, oh, whilst I'm at it, perhaps "Most Recent Streak" would be more motivating than "Current Streak" which I imagine would be at an awe-inspiring 0 for many of us way too often.

Terrible.<p>There's a good idea buried somewhere in this, but they managed to completely miss the mark.<p>1. It needs an off-switch (globally and per repo). How did this feature get out the door without that switch? Does Zuckerberg manage product at github now?<p>2. The data is useless. What does it tell me that ednapiranha "contributed" to X during the last month, without any quantification? Nothing.<p>3. The data is useless. For most people the "popular repositories"-box shows 5 popular projects <i>that they have forked</i>...<p>4. The data is useless. When I want to see what a user (or myself) has contributed to then I want to see <i>all of it</i>, not the last 1 month.<p>Github appeals to the self-improvement, tomato-timer, fitbit crowd here. Those people will start blogging in no time about how "commit-streak tracking changed my life", from their barefoot standing desks. For everyone else these vanity-stats are worse than wasted space; they are visual noise that pretends to convey useful information but doesn't.

I've wanted this for a <i>very</i> long time. I'm in search of a summer internship, so I've been hoping for a way for potential employers to quickly see what I've been working on. Not just my own projects, but also my pull requests to other projects.<p>Thumbs up for GitHub, this is a welcomed feature. Very attractive, too.

I'm not sure I like this.<p>It's generally considered that there's no effective way to measure productivity[0]. Whenever you introduce metrics, programmers end up gaming it: pay them by lines of code, they write too many lines of code; pay them by commit, and they're going to start committing too much.<p>These graphs are going to just cause programmers to both commit in too small chunks (or splitting up a commit into several), or delaying some overnight so that they have a longer streak. I know that the data was there already, but now it's made visible, people are going to start commenting on how much I'm coding.<p>[0]: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/324399/what-is-a-fair-productivity-measurement-technique-for-programmers" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/324399/what-is-a-fair-pro...</a>

Hm, I'm divided on this. It's cool to be able to see what someone works most on... But at the same time, there's the privacy concern of <i>being able to see what someone works most on</i>. I'd like the ability to turn it off—hell, you can already decide what repos you expose to the public, so why not activity?<p>Of course, I realize that your activity on GitHub is public anyway—but it's never been so <i>obvious</i>.

I don't think I'll be using github for anything else. There's too much stuff which can't be disabled, deleted, or otherwise hidden.<p>I don't like their idea of "sharing".

I don't know whether I'm pleased that it hides my private activity or whether -- because almost all my activity is in private repos -- to be upset by that :D<p>Anyhow. Very pretty.

I love this. I was not crazy about some of the changes Github had been making lately, but this is great! Way easier to see what someone has done at a quick glance vs having to scroll through a long list of repos.<p>The only thing I would suggest is like @tav said. They should change "Popular repositories" to "Featured repositories" and give users the option to edit the list. It could offer sort options (show 5 most recently active, show 5 most popular, show 5 most recently created) and also give an option to manually select which 5 to showcase and put them in a specific order.<p>In my case popularity works fine, but considering this is a way to showcase yourself offering some additional control is not the end of the world in my opinion.

Very cool! I used calendaraboutnothing /extensively/ - it was a hugely important motivational tool for me.<p>Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this counts contributions to non-master branches? I work mostly in branches and my calenderaboutnothing streaks were much longer.

FINALLY. I've been wanting a summary page for all the projects I'm working on. I don't get the streak thing though

Certainly makes github more recruiter friendly and more and more the techys' CV site.<p>"Can I program and work in a team? am I active? Check out my github profile"

Looks great. How can I disable this for my account?

Ha, if you look at a GitHub profile with a current streak of 0 days, the date range is "Rock - Hard Place" :)

Nice! A link to your gists (e.g. <a href="https://gist.github.com/username" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/username</a>) would also be nice to have on your profile page.

I love the idea of Github as a resume, and this is easily one of the best features that push it in that direction. It allows for a quick glance at what an author contributes the most to, which can be a quick way of identifying the most successful projects they work on.<p>It really fixes the problem that organizations always had of visibility. My commits to an org repo usually weren't visible on profile except in the feed and as a link to the organization. This is a big improvement.

omg that's me.

I love it overall, but it would be great if the user could fine tune it a bit. An example: Under "Repositories contributed to" on my page, I see two repos from a place I worked. Those repos are private, and after I left, I had my commit rights revoked (reasonably enough!). But the odd upshot is this: those two repos show up on my page, and yet if I follow the links, I get a 404 page (which is how GH handles this situation: "you're trying to look at a private repo where you are not a collaborator".).<p>Since that's the case, it would be great if I could manually remove those two repos. (Note: if I logout, those repos no longer appear. So I'm not complaining about what <i>others</i> see - which I think is handled very well. I'm just wishing that <i>I</i> had more control over what I saw.)

Having taken a few seconds to look at my (meager) contributions, it took me a while to understand the vertical axis of the field of boxes.<p>Then it hit me: it's happily US-centric, with weeks starting with Sunday. Aaargh. This should really be a user setting, since in my mind weeks start with Mondays.

Seems this has been some what divisive looking over the comments already posted here. Kudos for GitHub trying something different, it's a small tool that might help motivate people to keep going, in the same way fitness trackers do.

Wow this is great GitHub. One of my fave features so far. It was always a pain to see my most popular repositories and to view the repos that I have contributed to!

Like the idé , But don't know if it's that useful cause, It changes depending on who you are. Example if your Anonymous you went see much. If your a member of same Organization as the User your viewing , you will see different stats. And you self will also see other stats. So not sure whats the use-fullness of the feature.

I sent a support email suggesting this feature on the 17th of December - that's either a good turnaround time or they were already working on this!<p>I think it's great for people who mostly contribute to others' projects, rather than starting their own - which is arguably a better way to get involved in open source.

A dream for someone looking at a github profile with the purpose of see if he/she should be hired or not.

Hmm, doesn't seem to be connecting all the dots. None of the committers to Cassandra show Contributions there on their profiles: <a href="https://github.com/apache/cassandra/graphs/contributors" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/apache/cassandra/graphs/contributors</a>

When I read this news I was expecting something like this <a href="http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Stefan" rel="nofollow">http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Stefan</a> (show all repos that this person had done any commits/opened issues). Kinda sad.

As someone that's been working to wrap my head around how to work with and develop d3.js visualizations, this provides a great example of what's possible. Looks good, and the source definitely gives me a few things to investigate!

There's a repo that I am co-own, but since it was originally created by my colleague, it's shows up as he's the owner. Wish there was a way to make a repo equally credited on multiple profiles..

Awesome work dudes, I've been wanting something like this for a while.

It's interesting to see where GitHub is heading these days. The combination of software collaboration and showcasing projects / recruiter friendly profile pages is pretty compelling...

That's an interesting visualization of every day in the year. Anybody know if there is a standard name for them and/or any good tools for generating them in JS?

Very cool! It's interesting how much mine changes when I am logged in and can see all the private repositories I've contributed to at work.

Q: can you get these visualizations per project?

Is it just me or does this only count commits to master? Nothing in branches seems to show up for me.

Streak? C'mon, what is this, Xbox Live?<p>Not all commits are created equal and I don't find this new 'contributions' calendar/graph at all useful.<p>You still cannot get a good snapshot of contributions for users that are members of organizations.