Hacker News Reader

The punchcard might conceivably be useful for attempting to coordinate with the developers at the time when they're most active. Other than that, it does sort of feel like they just had a bunch of data lying around that they felt really needed to be shoved into a graph.

View on HN

It's interesting to look at major projects that have many commits to see when their active hours are. For instance, this is Linux's punch card: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/graphs/punch-card

Of course, interesting != useful

Wonder if that's adjusted for timezones. Would be nice to have a checkbox to either align by UTC or the commit's timezone (if that's even available).

It actually plots the local time, i.e. a commit at 3am PDT and another at 3am EST would contribute to the same circle on the plot. (I did a clone of the old GitHub graphs a while back.) So it isn't really useful for knowing when to contact faraway developers. On the other hand, it is fun to see how many committers are regular night owls.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com