Hack GitHub Streaks

Tonight, I was doing some research and maintenance on a couple of my open-source projects. In particular, I had recently learned about EditorConfig (which BTW, is a great idea! and a standard EVERYONE should adopt), and wanted to add it to most of my projects.

That brought me to my GitHub homepage, and I caught a glimpse of my GitHub streak. Only 2 days! I was on a roll for a few days, and then a few days of working on private projects reset my streak.

Not that it matters, anyways, but I was slightly bothered, and being the fan of automation that I am, I quickly thought up how to automate my GitHub contributions to keep my streak alive, artificially.

30 minutes later, github-streak is born and released to the world. I call that being diligent at slacking off.

It’s a fairly straightforward project that had a few requirements/constraints as I designed it:

• Had to be portable, modular
• Had to be cross-platform, as much as possible
• Had to be really simple technology and minimal dependencies–don’t overthink it

The result:

• Written in BASH/shell script (my favorite shell)
• Even uses the conscientious #!/usr/bin/env bash shebang directive
• Creates a symlink in /etc/cron.daily – probably won’t work for every system, but at least was available on my webserver and others that I’ve used in the past
• The script just appends a date string to a .streak file (hey, a new convention!) and git commits/git pushes
• Added in the .editorconfig and .travis.yml goodies
• MIT licensed (my favorite open-source license)

So, here you go internet, have at it: github-streak

Show some star/fork love. Plz thx kbye.

Edit: Here are some other GitHub projects worth checking out that manipulate commit history as art:

• https://github.com/jbranchaud/commitart
• https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
• https://github.com/bayandin/github-board