✨ humble beginnings
Since I made a career change, I knew that contributing to Open Source would be one of my free-time priorities as I deeply believe in collectivism and equity. Feeling a very strong presence of impostor syndrome, I initially contributed in the form of docs, tutorials or code-along lessons to various Open Source projects, mainly coding curricula. Writing has been always easier for me and years in formal and non-formal education helped me develop a sense of how to break complex issues down for newbies.
🌪 picking up speed
My first Open Source contribution was to girls.js curriculum for girls and women in Poland. Since then, I started enhancing the curriculum of my work place, Flatiron School. I care deeply about web accessibility and diversity and representation in tech and so I'd not only add new material, amend old one or fix code to be more a11y-friendly, I'd also add more diverse set of characters in the covert curriculum. Each of such commits would the waterfall down onto many children of the main repo. I wrote about it in April:
💥 contribution implosion
Three months later (all during long hours of lockdown), I was getting close to 15k contributions. My github profile was hardly ever visible. Here's the last time I was able to load it:
A month later, in late July, I was not able to access my profile ever. The course I was co-teaching at Yale was ending and I was worried that my malfunctioning github account would impact my chances of catching a recruiter's eye.
🌟 happy resolution
I reached out to Github support and they did confirm that this number of commits is resulting in a timeout error:
The only solution was to change the settings of my contribution chart from showing all possible contributions to only those made on my own repos:
This, of course, did not stop me from contributing — ✨ I am giddily participating in Hacktoberfest both as a participant and as a maintainer ✨
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📷 cover photo by Engin Akyurt from pexels
Top comments (21)
Wow thats amazing!
Did you ever get any word from github, or figure out exactly why the amount of contributions prevented you from loading that page? 🤔 Seems like something github should fix :P
Yeah — I provide an email screenshot from the Github support I received. It seemed the number of commits to different repos was causing the timeout error ¯_(ツ)_/¯
What an inspiring way to break github ! Congratulations !
Ha, thank you ✨
Hi Sylwia
I saw bigger numbers than that, for exemple : github.com/nul-dev he have 79k+ contribution
I wonder why it happen to you hmmm
Hm when I initially tweeted about it, I got many responses about that I must have hacked the github contribution graph. Maybe that's what the person did ¯_(ツ)_/¯
WOW! How do you program so fast?!
I don't!! Not at all!! It's just that the curriculum I was contributing to had cohorts fork the repos from the main one, which meant that each change would count for 30-90 commits 😭
I mean, it's still a lot of commits but it was quarantine 😂😭
oh boy, that makes me little bit relieved, thank you :)
haha thats a good way of breaking github! I wonder does squashing merge requests make a difference to this or do all the commits still exist on the graph then?
Yeah it is a funny and frustrating situation! So the way that one curriculum is set up means that one commit will become 30-90 commits within an hour because of all the forks and they are all commits to separate repos 😕
Very impressive.
Thank you, Brayden! I actually just read your post about your portfolio (and I loved it).
Thanks. Feel free to use it for anything you might need it for :D
Thank you!
Congrats 🎉
thank you!
Thank you! I really like your quiz app!
Wow, quite impressive!
Thank you, Henrique!