Do you know what you coded last summer? Or any of the previous three summers? Sure, you can always look at the “files and green tiles” on your GitHub account, but what if there was another way to see your coding history? Say, something like this:
The poster above shows what our Content Manager Holly coded in 2019. She worked on a lot of Vue.js and Laravel projects, and she made a lot of commits to the project for the Build a Laravel CRUD App with Authentication article.
It was generated by Your Year in Code, our fun new developer utility that visualizes a year of your GitHub commits. All you need is a GitHub account with at least one public repo. You specify the year and the app analyzes your repositories, counts your commits for that year, and generates a poster with a visualization of your coding activity in colors that vary with your projects’ language and platform.
Here’s my Year in Code for 2017. My public repos covered on two major projects — an Android app that draws real-time cartoon features over faces, and an iOS app that shows you the locations of nearby truck stops:
If you think of the way Your Year in Code represents your work as a peacock’s plumage, each “feather” represents a week’s worth of commits to a specific repo. The length of the feather represents the number of commits, and different languages/platforms are drawn in different colors. If you view your poster online, you can hover over individual feathers to get some details about the commits you made to its repo that week.
Let’s take a look at Year in Code for other members of the Auth0 Developer Relations team. Here’s Jess’ 2020, which features a lot of commits to her excellent GitHub-based blog...
...and here’s James’ 2020, in which he was a lean, mean, 5 million lines of code writing machine. Clearly I need to switch to his brand of coffee or energy drink:
Want to see what you coded last summer? It’s simple. First, connect your GitHub account to the Your Year in Code web app. Once your account is connected, you’ll be able to select the year whose repos to turn into a poster:
Once you click the Generate Year In Code button, the app will analyze your repositories, count your commits for that year, and generate a poster showing your work in bright, bold colors. You’ll be able to generate posters for 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
My home office walls are bare at the moment, but not for long. I’m going to print out my years of code, frame them, and look at them to inspire me during those trying moments when I’m stuck on a problem. If you need decoration, inspiration, or just want to know what you coded last summer, go to YearInCode.dev and see your years in code!
For those of you who want to know even more, Your Year in Code is open source! We published the source code and setup instructions on GitHub in the auth0/YearInCode repo.