392 Days GitHub streak

My current GitHub streak started on March the 13th 2014, so far 392 days. I started it, to stay more active on my side projects. I learned so much, and it has gotten me several opportunities including several job interviews, an internship in Palo Alto (which was a big deal, since I’m from Germany), and countless interesting conversations because people suddenly take me take serious.

So let’s start at the beginning. As I said I started the streak to be more active in my side projects. And that has gotten me pretty far, I am about to ship one of my larger projects, which is pretty exciting. (Actually its mostly university restrictions that’s keeping me from shipping since the documentation is part of a paper I still have to turn in and it is not allowed to be published publicly before it has been graded by my university)

What did I learn? Countless things! Even though most things did not end up being shippable, projects many were tiny experiments and a lot didn’t even make it into a repo, examples include:

  • anything Ruby related: Sinatra, ActiveRecord, Rails, DataMapper, ROM, EventMachine, Chef, and so much more
  • Git, GitHub (I have held several Git workshops, and more to come!)
  • CLI development
  • so many Cluster experiments with Docker or Vagrant and various configuration management tools (even held a talk at an awesome Berlin Meetup about one)
  • high availability setups (mostly Redis, Postgres and RabbitMQ)
  • Raspberry PI + Hardware
  • Golang experiments
  • Production Setups (several high availability setups, ELK-Stack, HAProxy, ElasticIP + keepalived, etc.)
  • nodejs, websockets, angluar

These are only examples of what I can think of out of my head. I can probably come up with a lot more if I take more time to think about it. The point is I learned a lot.

But I cannot keep it up much longer. I am having final exams and countless other projects to finish for university. I feel like if I am going to push myself much longer I am going to burn out and miserably fail in my exams. So as of today, I am not making myself commit every day. If I do something anyways, that’s fine I just want to write down for myself that I don’t have to anymore.

You are probably going to search through each and every day of the streak to check if I cheated or something, I probably did on some day, but that’s not the point and the experience I gained is something I will never lose.

If you are thinking about going on a long streak as well here’s some advice:

  • have a VERY stable development machine (I used a zenbook with ubuntu, which got replaced yesterday)
  • don’t let others tell you what a valid commit is and what not
  • have projects you are passionate about
  • experiment as much as you can (I have used so many GitHub repos which just demonstrate how to use something, publish everything!)

If I come up with more I will add additional points.

That’s all for now. I’m goint to sleep. I have an exam tomorrow.