30 Days of Github Streaking

This winter I started off with an interesting aim, trying to maximize my commit streak on github.

First of all, it’s really fun to see your stats (the green graph on your profile), and once you have a streak going, you should avoid breaking it! C’mon who likes seeing gray idle zones in a green graph!

It all started when I was working on TSHN I noticed that I had bettered my previous best was of 17 days streak! It was a lack-luster streak that I wanted to improve but just couldn’t find enough motivation.
And bang I broke my streak in just 3 days :(
So I decided to set up a task for myself.

The 30 day challenge

The task was simple: to keep the streak for atleast 30 days.
I started this streak off with a bang, contributing nearly 20 commits to my website and other various projects on the second day. Soon I went past that with 34 contributionsThis actually happened to be the most contributions in a single day that I made throughout the current streak.

One week into the challenge it was getting though to keep on contributing. I was nearly forgetting to commit or otherwise contribute, waiting until the last possible moment to submit my daily contribution. Ofcourse since GitHub runs on PST, which meant I could contribute anywhere from 12am — 1:30pm local time (IST) and have it count for the previous day. When I got home extra late a few nights, this trick had my back.

Three weeks in it was easier to remember to commit, it was becoming more of a habit.

Thirty days was exciting! I had made it! And all I wanted to do was keep going! After a couple of weeks, it just became a way of life. Eat, sleep, commit was a part of routine and I no longer found it difficult to include in my day-to-day rituals. But it was hard to be 100% consistent, so there were definitely some close calls on busy days and some tricks did help me save from ruining my streak.
These are present in Github FAQ

Looking Back

Looking back to the past 30 days, it has been quite fun to push myself and make sure I donot leave a dry mark. Also I did learn a couple of stuff:

• Try to work on multiple projects, in this way you have enough ways to contribute code
• Its not necessary to start your own project, helping someone with minor fixes is almost as good. After all that is what social coding is for
• I've noticed quite a few people commit a bulk of changes only once, but this sorta beats the purpose of using version control. Try to break a big task into small sub tasks and commit them accordingly, this will help to revert back easily. Regardless to say, it does help increase your contribution stats! </ul> All in all it has been a git streak winter! I'm not sure how much more I can possibly extend this streak considering we have the most dreadful 3rd year 2nd sem starting!
  
  Happy Streaking!