During the past year I have been doing some working out. No no there is no fitbit involved. Are you crazy? My physical activity includes a strict refusal of pointless efforts. I deliberately choose to use the bike rather than the bus, it has the purpose of transportation,. But just getting sweaty for the sake of it, well, that’s not my thing. I’m talking about a git-commit working out. I decided to have one commit a day on github (minimum) and instead of the fitbit or whatever phone app, I used the github timeline as a monitor.

So that’s one year now and I got my github timeline all green. In itself it doesn’t achieve anything except for myself. I mean, it’s quite easy to fill up a timeline with fake entries. But by getting this challenge of one commit a day, it led to some valuable outcomes. I got some more work projects validated to be published as open source. Whenever I was not feeling inspired for code commit, I was chasing typoes in my Readme’s, or dependencies upgrades in my gems.

Overall, it had quite a good impact on my coding publication, on the updating of my blog (well, that blpg mostly gather the rants I do here), and various other small details. Well, I’m not a very famous open source coder, just an average joe. But a persistent one. It’s very easy to just upload shit on github and forget about it. Having this regular commitment made me come back on some old things, keep them current somehow.

Getting some routine in place that includes open source activity has various benefits, even when you don’t have an audience. You should try it.