Streaks

I’ve enjoyed using the Github activity streak to keep working a little bit every day. Reading the book Atomic Habits gives a good reasoning for accumulating repeated, small gains every day, with the end result giving a much larger change that can be difficult to see as you go along. However, seeing a streak of activity has been a good way to make sure I’m on the right track. Even if I’m in the middle of a big issue, seeing those boxes light up reminds me I’m on the right track.

This is my activity up to the date of this post:

With two notable days missing:

• June 21, work on that day is on a branch yet to be merged.
• Saturday, August 26, must have been busy that day.

This streak is mostly updates to RugbyBot. Some days it’s one commit, others over 10. In fact, from June 3 to today, September 12, we have Showing 115 changed files with 17,665 additions and 60,106 deletions. This wasn’t in one big go, or even a crunch-week. But these small, continuous improvements have resulted in an application that is much more powerful than three months ago:

• Re-written UI in the admin area, making data entry much simpler.
• More stable cron with better visibility and testability. This gives me confidence I can go to sleep and everything will run smoothly.
• Background worker testing for RWC Daily Threads. This adds another type of post I can make in the future.
• Multi Match Threads (starting with the 2023 NPC). This can clean up the subreddit a bit.

and much more.

All of this to say I’m happy with how daily progress can compound. I want to apply this to other areas: can I use it to read more? To get through my movie list? To write more posts like this? Perhaps. I should make a new app to track other things. Sure, it probably exists elsewhere, but this is also a fun side-venture.

Hence, a command line application. This shows the last thirty days.

$ streak
Current streaks
[  rugbybot] ...................+++..++++...
[   reading] ........................+......
[        tv] ......................++..++.+.
[    movies] ..................+++++.+.++++.
[   writing] ...................+..+....+..+
[   chinese] ............................+..

What constitutes an entry? Whatever I want. For movies, it’s 30 minutes of a movie. For tv, an episode. For reading, “a little bit”. As long as it’s something then I’m happy that it’s building towards something better. And yes, this post counts as an entry for writing.

Now, staring at my ever-growing list of movies to watch is less daunting, since I know I’m working through it (there’s probably a deeper issue here, but for now we won’t worry about that).

Everything is stored in the rock-solid text files. I want to add a bit of configuration, and today having found charm.sh and rich python formatting, it could use some slight UI improvements. I’m a big fan of the extremely light weight cmd interface.

I definitely want to push these results live, but for now, it’s a useful little demo project. This helps me continue forward, and as a great philosopher once said, just keep swimming.

Now having said all that,

$ streak log writing -m "streak post"