# A Successful Year of Commits

DevFeed: [A Successful Year of Commits](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/a-successful-year-of-commits-21073.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://jakeyesbeck.com/2016/04/26/a-successful-year-of-commits/>)

Published: 2016-04-26T12:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Jake Yesbeck](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/jake-yesbeck.md>)

Topics: [Open Source](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/open-source.md>), [Ruby](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ruby.md>), [Rails](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/rails.md>), [Programming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming.md>), [Development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/development.md>), [Maintainers](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/maintainers.md>)

Tags: [github](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/github.md>), [maintainers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/maintainers.md>), [open-source](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source.md>), [open-source-software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source-software.md>), [programming](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming.md>), [rails](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/rails.md>), [ruby](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ruby.md>)

## AI overview

The author recounts completing a year-long commitment to make at least one commit every day to an open source repository, beginning and ending on April 26. Limited free time made contributions to other people's repositories difficult, so the author also worked on personal projects and built libraries, while continuing to contribute to projects on GitHub. The experience improved the author's programming ability and exposed them to different coding styles.

## Source excerpt

At Rails Conf 2015, I met a lot of great people from the Ruby community. These people had a profound effect on me, instilling in me a new motivation to become part of something larger than myself. A year ago today, I embarked on a journey to better myself as a Software Engineer. I decided to commit to open source software every day for a year. Even though open source software has been around for decades, up until a year ago I had thought it mostly magic and far beyond my reach. After Rails Conf 2015, it became clear to me that contributing to and becoming part of the open source community was not so far fetched. The Plan The word "plan" might be a bit generous for what I decided to do. I was going to "just keep doing commits for a year". Surely doing something over and over again will yield good results...right? It has to have at least some effect on some aspect of my programming ability. And so that is what I did. For one year, I made at least one commit to an open source repository (someone else's or my own) every day: I started this endeavor on April 26th 2015 and ended it today, April 26 2016. Reality Check At the beginning of the year, I was under the impression that I was going to be able to contribute to other people's repositories every day without too much effort. That idea was soon shattered due to the short time constraints I had to work with. After all, I am happily employed and unable to devote more than a few hours a day to open source work. Exploring someone else's code base, reproducing an issue and finding a solution can take more than a few hours. It became clear that I needed to fill in gaps of time with my own projects. This ended up being much more fun than I had anticipated and I got to build some cool libraries that people would actually use: Passages validates_type Rescue Groups validates_subset Honest Renter However, this does not mean that my only contributions were to my own projects. Oh no, far from it, I forked repositories on Github like