Nearly two years ago, GitHub introduced contribution calendars on everyone's profile, which roughly visualize how frequently one has been "contributing" for the past year. Through 2013, mine displayed some interesting patterns and features, many of which scream that they have a story:

Having used GitHub as the primary code host for multiple full-time jobs, and a few growing open-source projects, I now believe that these calendars introduce, for me, two negative effects that vastly outweigh their benefits.

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When writing tools for git, or while working on more complex projects, I often need to work with the git configuration or hooks.

Unfortunately (or so I sometimes feel), the configuration and hooks are not stored in the tree (the version controlled part of repo), and must be installed out of band. This easily leads to a non-uniform configuration across clones.

Let's get that information in band!

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The second GitHub Data Challenge recently finished, and GitHub just announced the winners.

The first place went to The Open Source Report Card, which generates an English prose summary of your GitHub activity (from January to March 2013), and provides some charts to back it up.

My report card for that period is somewhat eerie (to me):

Mike is a serious Pythonista (one of the top 13% most active Python users) who loves pushing code. Mike is a nine-to-fiver who seems to work best in the mid-afternoon.

[...]

It seems—from their activity streams—that Mike and westernx are probably friends or at least virtual friends. With this in mind, it's worth noting that westernx is less foul mouthed

I would love to see a chart about my tendency to swear in commit messages.