Today my Github streak turned 50. Yes, I’ve been trying to maintain it and yes I’m writing a blog post about it.

Few weeks ago me and my friend were casually chatting up about the github streak and how people are keeping up to it continuously for months (even years) and how recruiting revolves around the commits one has publicly done, flaws in the system, benefits of it and etc., After the chat we wanted to try how hard it will be to maintain the streak and so we started a bet within ourselves on who loses the streak first.

What is it?

Github as you know is a code repository service and Github streak is an activity timeline which shows how a person is active on github based on his contributions to public code. It tracks private repos too but won’t be available to others.

Coders love to maintain it(?!) and recruiters love to see it filled. Maintaining the streak is like an achievement as how Roger won wimbeldon consecutively. There are even sites that tracks who has the longest streaks at github. And there are bots to auto commit daily (WTF humans). What once supposed to be an information panel turned into a score board of how people trying to race others.

How hard it is?

Actually, it’s pretty hard if you wanted to genuinely code daily and super easy if you just wanted to achieve commits.

We didn’t stipulate any strict rules other than there should be daily commits and those should be published. I accept, few days into it, it felt like a drug and wanted to go to any extreme to maintain the streak.

Once, I made a commit by only creating a repo with licence and readme from a Dominos from my mobile since I forgot to commit that day and I don’t want to lose the streak. I felt bad, but it wasn’t a bogus repo, I actually publish code to it still.

Was it any good?

While talking about the evil, we should also talk about the good. After making some sort of streak at which I don’t want to lose it, I began to form ideas that I could create and publish as open source.

Even if you are cheating you can’t commit your readme by adding and removing dots all day or publish repos daily. So, I started few projects and even completed them.

These are actual usable things lying in the form of repos as a result of one man’s greed to maintain his github streak.

It felt good. I contribute to other projects and continuously pushing myself to code daily and put my code open.

In the end

He lost on the 41st day in and I got my book delivered few days back ;).

Now that we witnessed how hard it is and the benefits of it, we again started the game two days after he lost. This time with high stakes and this time with stricter rules TO CODE DAILY.

I’m still going on and in my 50th day streak and I hope to continue add trailing zeroes to it.