https://github.com/ryanml/Github-Game-of-Life
Something fun I did with the contribution graph a couple of years ago. Lets you play Conway's Game of Life (sort of) with the graph. More crowded contribution graphs make for slightly less interesting generations. You can enable/disable cells if you'd like.
An aside: the contribution graph can be gamed:
> I dove into testing different methods within Puppeteer and was able to grab screenshots of contribution graphs from GitHub usernames.
Is there no API for contribution graphs, or formula that GitHub uses to generate these based on previous activity?
> it takes 100 commits to turn a gray square green on her contribution graph
I wonder if people "game" the system here (since apparently it's an important metric). For example, you could split a commit in two ...
I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in GitHub's profile system, and this is a good example of it. The contribution graph looks pretty -- but what if it could be a souvenir? A lot of programming projects are hard to quantify in terms of success -- besides shipping the product, it's hard to see visible signs of bug reporting, refactoring, etc.
I'd love to see GitHub selling physical tokens that measure this. She did a fantastic job with this project -- but applying it to a commercial side as part of the shop would be cool. I'm not sure how well anything like this can scale, though.
I'd also like to see more exploration beyond the contribution graph for measuring impact. I know it's not perfect, but it is neat.