Martin from GitHub here. I think we’d consider this very much ‘by design’ in removing the streak counter so I’m glad it had the desired affect. Coding 100 days straight with no breaks isn’t good for anyone.
Martin thanks for jumping in, the thing I'd love most is when I'm logged in and go to github.com, just take me to my repository list. I'd pay money for that.
The commit graph should at lest have a disclaimer of some kind. Plus I think the lines of code added/removed are a better indicator than number of commits. Perhaps with some heuristic to detect whether a lot of lines were being changed similarly, such as if code was changed by a wizard or from a find and replace.
A colleague once showed me a tool to produce back dated commits in bogus git repos so you can draw pictures on your commit graph. You should know that people are gaming the gamification.
> Coding 100 days straight with no breaks isn’t good for anyone.
Why? I've done that and it has been amazing for me. I don't want other people telling me what's good or not. Absolute statements like this is just social malaise and not based in objectivity in the slightest.
The current social bandwagon can be summarized as: “Work is bad. Hard work is toxic. Perseverance is not healthy”.
HN is just reflecting r/antiwork ethics.
Complete and utter social non-sense. People have just stopped thinking for themselves.
> Absolute statements like this is just social malaise
> Complete and utter social non-sense. People have just stopped thinking for themselves.
Yes, absolute statements are a problem - including your comment. There's context around antiwork, there's context around grind culture - everything can be taken to an unhealthy extreme.
Gamifying non stop daily “contributions” does not seem healthy to me.
I work 5 days per week. I may not commit every day. Typically I will, except when I'm ill, or my close family is seriously ill, or there's a funeral, wedding, holiday, etc. So, life gets in the way, I guess.
If you're compelled to work all the time, every day, for months on end, good for you I guess. But I wouldn't skip my life to satisfy any KPI.
I will, however, persevere. I work hard. I do not give up easily. I learn something new all the time. I try to get better every day. I do my best to contribute to my family, my company, my society, and humanity at large.
However, life, I've realized, is long. My priorities have shifted over time. In the past, the value I've created in my work has not always ended up where I'd like.
If you have all this figured out 100%, then yes, go for it! Don't stop! The rest of us are still figuring it out.
Oh, also, I don't work with GitHub at all. Imagine that.
Right on, this is the spirit. Committing yourself to a goal, like learning piano or not missing a single day at the gym is a great “gamification” motivation. That doesn’t mean you have to miss a funeral or have a complete mental breakdown.
> People have just stopped thinking for themselves.
I see the opposite. People are thinking for themselves and are looking at empirical evidence like TFA to boot.
Edit: your other comment about needing targets makes me suspect you'd benefit from using a personal task manager that can clearly and tangibly visualize progress if you aren't using one already.
I learnt early to task things out, in my head/notes.
Graphical representation seems like a crutch to me.
Specifically regarding 100 days of coding - with truly zero breaks yes this is ridiculous. Defined as design instead, it's not - I work best in periods of long productivity, but I also require time to focus on different activities, else I suffer in ways that affect my performance. If you can't write code, that's fine, maybe look at the problem a different way or build that tool which helps you succeed in your 100 day goal.
That's the opposite of poor work ethic, IMO, and that's exactly what is required (mental breaks) in order to succeed, at least in my experience.
It's fairly factual, just because you have a way you might like to work or think is best doesn't mean it's the only one. People are very different, perhaps there is some psychological profile which behaves differently than another, regardless just as there are extroverts and introverts, people don't all work best in one way.
I suspect most people can benefit from breaks, and the studies seem to back this up. Perhaps you are the special one - not the other way around.
Someone commented about running challenges. Similar. I need a target to achieve and a reason to motivate myself. Frankly speaking, I’m terrible at writing code but I do it for fun.
Well one might start to excessively think like a computer!
For example, most humans can account for the imprecise nature of language and understand that "for anyone" doesn't necessarily mean every individual human on earth, but rather a sizeable portion of people. And "isn't good" is speaking relative to the poster's ideas rather than them claiming to have determined an absolute measure of the term "good".
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But a computer struggles with such fuzzy constraints and falls back to the most literal interpretation of any statement.
At which point the GPT-3 model the computer is running might regurgitate some overreaction by jumping from someone essentially saying: "everything in moderation" to interpreting it as an attack on hard work and good work ethics.
This is an unfair attack. Choosing "for anyone" instead of another phrase does indeed carry meaning. You're both finding more meaning than is justified. A little wobble in imprecision from martin led to a bigger one in systemvoltage, led to a bigger one in you.
(A better ending sentence from martin might've been "We don't want to incentivize 100-day streaks." But that has its own, orthogonal downsides--oh, GitHub's in the business of setting incentives? Uh oh... So all in all, I think I understand his choice of phrasing.)
This would be unfair if they didn't springboard into:
> The current social bandwagon can be summarized as: “Work is bad. Hard work is toxic. Perseverance is not healthy”. HN is just reflecting r/antiwork ethics. Complete and utter social non-sense. People have just stopped thinking for themselves.
This is generally not even-keeled behavior.
"Everything in moderation" dates back to 6 BC. This was clearly an reinterpretation of that basic idea. No reason to hop into a tirade into the death of hard work or something.
I’m just generally fed up of antiwork culture here. We are teaching youngsters to never persevere and push themselves to the limit, ensuring they’ll never realize their full potential and spiraling downwards in a low quality life of lethargy and resentment towards those who succeed.
I thought this is “Hacker News”. The tone here has slid significantly in last 5 years. Folks like Martin apologizing indirectly.
> We are teaching youngsters to never persevere and push themselves to the limit, ensuring they’ll never realize their full potential and spiraling downwards in a low quality life of lethargy and resentment towards those who succeed.
I think you vastly misunderstand the entire point of antiwork. Its not saying go sit on a couch all day. Its to recognize you have a life outside of work and its okay if work isn't your driving factor in life.
You can learn to persevere and push yourself many many ways. Work is not the only way. Not excelling at your job does not mean you are lethargic and resentful.
Success is measured many different ways, by many different people. You seem to measure it by how hard you work, that's great. Doesn't mean everyone has too.
I have been programming for decades, and I have never had a time of outstanding productivity without times of times of much less activity. Creative activity, for many people, is non-linear and not a recipe based activity. Sure, writing the fourth app in a framework, you can crank it out, but coming up with a great framework for the type of applications rhat your business and technical environment requires something else, a metaphorical walk around the park, while the various possible pieces od solitions kind of simulate themselves in your muttering only half conscious imagination. The sort of solutions that achieve the agile manifesto imperative to maximize work not done. You find interfaces that simplify the problem space so much that so much possible code becomes unneeded.
I find too many people mistaking velocity for progress to be an almost insolvable organization problem. if you want to end up with mega lines of code that are all part of a useless of incomprehensible solution that is certainly a job, but might fail as a life's contribution.
I am no longer an eager youth, but when i was, the thing that hooked me to push on past limits, was my excitement and joy about solving real problems, at scale, with software, with a simple yet powerful idea. It was not any history of frequent commits or risong to rhe 95th %ile or the barren useless of a streak. It was having an idea born out of real needs and made simple enough to need almost no comlexity to implement. Having that novel simplicity go into production and be used was motivation for a lifetime of work.
I certainly have periods of stillness and more restful learning than prodigious output, but they are, for me at least, completely necessary. they may be fairly lethargic as well.
I'm a believer in code everyday. It doesn't need to be more than a few seconds long for it to count. Leave an editor open and add a function if that's all you have today.
Could you explain why you believe daily code contributions are beneficial? If one can only feel inclined to add a simple function then it could be indicative of burnout, and thus time off is needed, not a gamified-obligation to write code.
It builds a habit and moves you closer to your overall goal. It's similar to a common suggestion for writers who want to write a book: open an editor and write at least one sentence per day. Or doing at least one push-up every day.
No more zero days, so to speak.
Starting is often the hardest part. An easy task makes it harder for you to talk yourself out of it. It also keeps the ball rolling.
I think the OP meant "code" in its purest sense - writing something for themselves, not necessarily pushing the contributions to GitHub as a part of gamification.
You don't have to do it if you're disciplined. I struggle with it and I find tiny daily habits useful.
Habits have context. I do gardening and I have a habit of checking my garden beds for weeds and diseases every day. I don't do it in winter when it's freezing and nothing is growing. I'll pick it up again in spring.
You don't have to game the system you've created. The habits are for you, not the other way around.
If you have nothing to fix you obviously don't need a productivity hack. It's called being done and you should either retire or move on to something else.
It helps me avoid procrastination. "Don't break the chain" is the only productivity hack that has actually worked. Even if you only need to do the bare minimum it helps you to get started (which is the hardest part for professional procrastinators), so it seldom stops there.
There are many entire fields of software achievement that have not been realized yet that are just "take this common idea/technique from field X and apply it to software." Limiting your own intellectual exposure to only currently existing software methods seems like it will cause you to miss possibilities for orders of magnitude improvement from time to time. Assuming you are including quantum field theory, cladistics, chemical engineering, history of societies, mathematics and linguistics as part of that non-sense. We live in an epoch of more learning than anyone can absorb, so there are fortunes to be made in moving learnings around.