When I was going through my Coding Boot Camp and as I teach at Coding Dojo we always mention these little green dots. You know the ones. Those dots on Github. The darker the are the more code you have committed to github on any given day. But are those dots really important? In a word YES!…..no wait MAYBE? Guess I can’t use just 1 word.
I recently saw a post on LinkedIn where this Developer had nearly a year of no green dots. Now some folks would say thats bad. Employers won’t like that. Others might ask for the why? Maybe there is a good reason for not working or committing any code during that time. What really struck me about the post though? It was the beautiful green dot all the way in the lower right hand corner. The one that said…..hey I’m not done yet. Sure the more dots and the more darker dots the better over all but this person also posted their why.
Taking are of your health and family should ALWAYS come first. All developers get burnt out. There is always going to be spots in our graphs where there is nothing or a few really light green dots. And you know what? Good! That means that you are taking care of you or you are living. As long as there are dots that follow that down spot thats all that matters.
I am a Web Developer and I teach web Development and look at my graph. Granted I have a few github accounts so I would really need to overlay my graphs to truly show things but for my personal account this is what you would see. Clearly October/November were highly productive months and April was not. In this case it is easy to explain….in April I was stupid and committed all my code using the other user name….didn’t work on any personal projects. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t coding….but like I said my graph is weird. If you notice Feb is a little light too. I was going through a burn out. We all do. Every developer will at some point. But I absolutely love my job. I was talking to my daughter just today about it. Could I make more money if I were teaching at a University? Maybe. Could I be making more money if I worked just as a developer for a big company? Sure. But why? I get to code every day, help new developers learn new skills, I have time between helping students and admin work to work on my own projects and even teach myself new languages or programs and the pay isn’t bad.
So my green dots will continue to grow and multiply (I should really try to find a way to get a graph of all the accounts together…that would be cool. Maybe I will make one. ) and I will take it 1 day at a time. My health, my family, they will come first….and as long as after a bit of nothing as long as a green dot appears I know I am still on the right path.