GitHub 50 Years From Now

How To Calculated Streaks Longer Than 366 Days?

First of all I think there are only a handful of users who have streaks longer than 366 days. Which means whatever expensive way I come up with to calculate their longest streak I will only have to do it for them and only once.

Storing Daily Streak Count

If I only want to calculate streak counts longer than 366 days once, I’m going to need to start storing the count of commits for every single day of the year for every user. This data can then be used to create contribution graphs longer than 1 year. If I do something like this I probably would try and find a way to make the contribution graphs vertical.

GitHub 50 Years From Now

GitHub is still a baby, but imagine we are in the future 30 to 50 years from now, okay even 7 years from now. GitHub is still going to be around and I think there is a lot of important historical data that we aren’t capturing that would be very useful to have. What if we could easily browse the public repos of Alan Turing or Dennis Richie? The truth is we don’t have that code any more, but what if we could start today with our current heros of the day slowly contributing to something amazing that our world 50 years from now will be using. We could go back in time, long after that person has passed a way and still see their commits and the important decisions they made.

This is why we study history in school, to learn from our ancesters. In essence we are the sum total of all their contributions. I think there are important lessons to be learned from them and I strongly beleive there are important lessons to be learned from the programmers of today 50 years from now, but we need to have easy access to their code.