# Maintaining a 500-Day GitHub Contribution Streak for Documentation and Habit Building DevFeed: [Maintaining a 500-Day GitHub Contribution Streak for Documentation and Habit Building]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Wojtek Gawroński (afronski) Published: 2016-02-17T22:30:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Wojtek Gawroński]() Topics: [Git](), [dotfiles](), [Open Source]() Tags: [c-sharp](), [canvas](), [clojure](), [css](), [css3](), [erlang](), [git](), [github](), [html](), [html5](), [javascript](), [mono](), [net](), [node-js](), [open-source](), [projects](), [sicp](), [vagrant](), [webgl]() ## AI overview The author describes maintaining a 500-day GitHub contribution streak and explains that the practice supported personal documentation, disciplined commit history, workload planning, community activities, and open-source contributions. The article also notes that contribution histories can be artificially altered using separate repositories and rewritten dates, and that streak quantity does not measure programming quality. ## Source excerpt 500 shades of Green No, it is not fake. I did it - I have managed to have real streak which last 500 days in a row and document it on Github. But, you can do it in a different way - there are couple of projects which allows you to create arbitrary history of your contributions (it uses a separate repository for that and well - it cheats using ability of git to bend the time). One is here. :wink: No, it does not mean anything. I am not a better programmer than anyone else, definitely quantity does not involve quality (I will describe this in details below). No, it does not mean that I did not have proper holidays or that I have spent all my free time on that. Why did you do that? Mainly because of two reasons: documentation and creating habits. Many of the repositories like afronski/playground-notes, afronski/dotfiles or afronski/papers_i_love are pure and private documentation of my notes, publicly visible settings and observations with commit history. It also helped me when it comes to developing new habits: Taking care about commit history, proper commit messages, linear and nice history. Working with facilities like rebase, squash or fix-ups helped me a lot in daily job. Besides that some commits have attached story with explanation why I applied that change. It is sometimes priceless, because I can drop my mental overhead related to fear of forgetting something important. And when I hit the same wall again I can tackle it with certainty and exact solution. Example here. Also having a daily habit of delivering something valuable is crucial. It helps a lot when it comes to daily work, when it comes to planning the workload, actual steps to be done. It also helps regarding planning my weeks and during a lot of other related activities - like meet-up organization, building community around them or preparing real contributions to open source projects. Another point is related with developing other habits. It is easier to develop a new habit on top of existing foundat