✨ 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 ✨
——
📷 cover photo by Engin Akyurt from pexels
Top comments (21)
What an inspiring way to break github ! Congratulations !
Ha, thank you ✨
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)_/¯
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
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)_/¯
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 😕
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 :)
Wow, quite impressive!
Thank you, Henrique!
Thank you!
Thank you! I really like your quiz app!
Congrats 🎉
thank you!