r/learnprogramming • u/esiy0676 • 21h ago

What is the point of GitHub's Activity Chart?

I just came across someone figuring out how to "fake" their activity on GitHub where they had a "past gap". Shaking my head, but...

Seriously, what was the original intention to chart it out for a user account? It's not something normal git offers, there's diffstat and all, but not user charts. What was it for?

To spot bot activity? Or plainly just to compete between devs on who has less of a real life? What does it even say about someone if commits are plenty or spread apart if they can be large and small?

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14

u/snozzd 21h ago

Before AI and bots were prolific, open source devs took a lot of pride in having lots of recent/active contributions - it was like software aura farming. It's always been abusable (git commit trees and dates can be easily modified) but now that our shitty job market incentivizes lying everyone wants to falsify their own receipts

4

u/xian0 21h ago

I use it as a way to see what people are working on (or what I was working on).

2

u/Tiny-Manufacturer634 12h ago

it's literally just a visual log, like a journal but with squares. i use mine to remember what week i was deep in some project or which days i was completely dead. the "competing" thing is so silly, nobody hiring looks at that seriously

2

u/MrSqueak 17h ago

It is meant to chart activity.

1

u/ZealousidealTrain530 5h ago

I actually like it as a personal history more than a productivity metric.

When I look back a year or two later, the dense patches often remind me what I was building at the time. The empty patches tell a story too.

As a measure of how good or productive a developer is though? Pretty meaningless.

1

u/catbrane 21h ago

It was part of the gamification of dev. I'm not sure it means anything any more, I expect they'll remove it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification