One of my personal favorite measures of my own success has always been my code committing frequency. With Git being heavily integrated into my development cycle, it’s consistently the best measure of my non-work endeavors. However, in the last year or so, as I’ve transitioned increasingly to Work development, all hosted in private repos and of little contribution to the open source community at large. I’d like to see what a little discipline will be able to contribute to my personal development time. When I was younger, every year’s highlight was NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The goal was to write 100,000 words in the month of November. In fact, that was the only goal — words. You could submit 100K of the word ‘a’ and it would count. But the freedom to not only write a bunch of bull that made no sense if you really needed to, and the strict time/length limitations led to a fascinating creativity on the part of the participants.

Drawing from that inspiration, I’m going to start today working towards the goal of publishing code on GitHub at least once a day. It doesn’t have to be quality code. It can be a typo correction, whitespace adjustment, anything. But I need to do it at least once a day.

The first thing I did upon determining such a resolution was turn to find an appropriate WordPress/GitHub integration — ideally a sidebar to emulate GitHub’s own Contributions visualization:

It would seem like a widget displaying this data would be pretty straightforward, but I wasn’t able to find one. If someone is aware of something like that, please feel free to let me know in the comments – but in the meantime I’m going to be working to develop one as a WordPress plugin integrating with GitHub. Ideally a 2.0 release would feature other repositories such as BitBucket, but this should be enough for now.

I’m excited to see what comes out of this microproject. More to come.