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How to improve your GitHub vanity metrics FAST

Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard on January 29, 2024

At the end of last year, I was contacted by a dev who said something like Wow, you have an impressive GitHub profile. I won't lie, it's...

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𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️ • Jan 29

Regarding the time travel thing: I have this fun little script named git-timeshift that looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
DATE="$1"; shift 1
export GIT_AUTHOR_DATE=$(date +%s -d "$DATE")
export GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=$GIT_AUTHOR_DATE
git "$@"

So I can just type stuff like git timeshift "in 1 hour" commit and the commit (or whatever other command I run) will happen one hour in the future 🤭

Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Jan 29

A whole new world of possibilities to confuse your colleagues, ah ah

𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️ • Jan 29

Pretty sure that's still far from the worst thing you can do with git if you really want to confuse people. Like, I've more than once re-ordered commit trees before merging branches to turn my erratic changes into a more coherent representation of what changes were made, and that inevitably leads to commits sometimes being completely out of chronological order :D

Ahmad Ali • Jan 30

Not cool; while the lessons the author wrote are pretty valuable, I advice against this fpr juniors.

Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Jan 30

The article is tagged with #jokes

Bobby • Jan 30

May be worth mentioning/reminding people that this only looks good from an initial glance - if someone digs in, clicking through, it can make it obvious that there is only one repo that is there to serve up a commit history. Nonetheless, I have gotten many a compliment in interviews about it!

You can also scaffold out several projects in the language and framework of choice and create a fake history for each of them so that it looks like you're working on some cool things, but none of this will work if someone wants to dig in quickly to see what some of your commits may have actually looked like at some random point in time