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Comment by whichdan | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised at how dismissive all of the comments have been so far. There are a lot of cultural habits around programming that are exclusionary, and if we're trying to pull more people into the field, discouraging people who can't code every single day could have a negative impact. It's at least worth exploring.

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"Exclusionary" connotes a lot of things nowadays, especially something like "something that 80% of the people within the culture can do and they lock out those that can't". But the reality is that the vast majority of people really can't commit usefully every day. If I see a perfectly green graph, I assume it's been gamed. Even if the commits are real, I'm confident many days will have useless commits in them. Given the political firepower currently carried by "exclusionary", I don't think it's worth flinging it at this problem. It's a stupid metric like your level on Google Play or the count of Platinum trophies you have on your Sony account, making only a small percentage of people do something they otherwise wouldn't, not something preventing anyone from getting into programming or something.

Okay, that's a fair point. I do think you bring up something important: we're all aware that a perfectly green graph means that it's either been gamed, or that the person spends an inordinate amount of time coding, but someone new to the field would have no idea.

I guess I'm glad that my github graph looks like the end of a minesweeper game. >.<

Its not that I'm not working, just that most of the stuff I do I tend to either cleanup and squash commits for, or they tend to be very much research project type deals that sure I can commit something but most of the time it would end up as: "this didn't work", "neither did this".

I'd love to commit something meaningful every day but honestly can't be arsed most of the time. If I'm sitting there at a serial terminal figuring out why I can't boot on an arm board, what silly thing should i commit? I have org notes that document that stuff, commits are for semi useful things not a measure of work/worth.

I use GitHub fairly often, but I don't code every day. When I do, it's not always on GitHub. Even when it is going to go on GitHub, I don't necessarily even push a commit every day.

I don't find it particularly discouraging. It's not something that anybody should be taking seriously. The streak measure is the least useful but, frankly, all the GitHub measures are of rather limited value.

StackOverflow does a much better job of putting relevant information in the public profile, though admittedly they have the benefit of a voting mechanism that helps point out what things you did were actually useful.

You wouldn't call the amount of stars you have on X video game exclusionary. Why this graph?

Everybody doesn't have to live in a bubble-boy world with all their beautiful feelz.

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