177 days ago I read a blog post about 177 days of GitHub. 177 days later, I am at my 177th day of GitHub contributions! The apprentice is now at the same level as the master, and as it seems I will surpass him and carry his legacy forward!
It has been very interesting, and I’ve learned a lot about myself over the past six months, especially about my habits. I’m very proud over the fact that I have been doing this over almost half a year now. Granted, some days have been less effective and meaningful, but I’ve still always managed to do it.
The only time I’ve actually employed trickery was when GitHub changed the rules about timezones. Before this change, contributions ran on PST (San Francisco time), meaning that my contribution window for a certain date was 9:00AM - 9:00AM. One day not long ago, I was coding a bit just before midnight. Before committing, I got a phone call. That call lasted a bit more than an hour, so when it was done and I committed and pushed, my heart stopped. My streak was dead. I calmly panicked and tried to figure out what happened. When I found the blog post linked above, I decided that GitHub changed the rules without me really knowing it, so I tricked the commit back into the streak. Not the proudest moment, but hey.
Unfortunately, sometimes life comes in the way. Today was such a day. For more than the last 24 hours, the systems I work with have been having… troubles. Of course, this being the week when I am in a temporary leadership position, this led to me being the one responsible of coordinating efforts to fix everything that’s broken. This is, as one can imagine, exhausting. Especially if it drags on to the point where you need a lot of overtime. As such, my contributions for today have been weak, but I have done them. And that’s a success to me, since I am at the point where I am almost amazed at the fact that I can keyboard coherently.
So, all in all, I’ve become a better person since I now have at least a slight sense of discipline, and I’ve contributed back to the world that enables me to be them powerhouse of a hax0r I am today. 177 days, roughly ~900 commits, over 30 projects contributed to, and countless hours of awesome coding fun times! It’s a win-win, it feels awesome, and I hope that I will continue doing it for way more than 177 more days!
And to that note, I will now collapse in the most collapsing way anything has collapsed in quite a while. Bonne nuit.
(…and then a couple of days later, something else happened…)