An art project. If you're here because the graph caught your eye, that's the piece working. See ABOUT.md for the plain version.
I've been watching something happen.
People are gaming the graph. Quietly, then less quietly. A friend with a cron job. A colleague with an agent. A stranger on the leaderboard with a contribution history that doesn't quite add up if you look twice. None of it new, exactly. But the volume is new. The ease is new. The indifference is new.
At the same time, I kept thinking about all the work that has never been on GitHub at all.
The review comment that talked someone out of a bad abstraction. The meeting you made ten minutes shorter. The doc you wrote so three people wouldn't have to ask. The incident that didn't happen because you caught it first. The junior you unblocked on a Tuesday afternoon. The refactor you chose not to do. The scope you cut. The thing you said no to. The hour you spent staring at a wall until the answer showed up.
None of it is here. None of it is on any graph. All of it is the job.
So I made this. Partly as a piece. Partly as research — I wanted to find out whether it was even possible. Whether a single person, on a laptop, in an afternoon, could convincingly fake the thing an entire industry treats as evidence. The answer turned out to be yes, easily, and that answer is most of what the repo is about.
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Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1 contribution graph (52 weeks)
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Amount per serving
Commits ............................. 99,999
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% Daily Value *
Real work ................................ 0%
Performative output .................. 4,200%
Reviewed PRs ............................. 0%
Mentored juniors ......................... 0%
Said "no" to bad ideas ................... 0%
Whiteboarded until it made sense ......... 0%
Caught an incident before it paged ....... 0%
Deleted more lines than added ............ 0%
Wrote the doc so nobody had to ask ....... 0%
Listened ................................. 0%
Stayed late to explain it again .......... 0%
Rubber-ducked a teammate ................. 0%
Cut scope ................................ 0%
Changed your mind in public .............. 0%
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* Percent Daily Values are based on a career
that actually produces something. Your
career may vary.
Ingredients:
python, cron, subprocess, a little grief.
Contains: no real work.
May contain traces of: things I wanted to
say out loud but couldn't find the form for.
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Every green square on this profile for 2024 and 2025 came from this repository. A script wrote them in under a minute. On those two years, the lit squares spell CODER across the graph — one word, twice, in the calendar.
There is no product here. No library. No cleverness hidden in the diffs. The commit history is the artwork. The README is the placard. The graph is the canvas. That's the whole thing.
Two quiet facts, sitting next to each other.
One. It is now trivial to fake the thing we pretend is a measurement. I did this with a script on a laptop in the time it takes to make coffee. Other people are doing far more than this, faster, with agents, every day. The graph was already a thin signal. It's becoming a decoration.
Two. The work I am proudest of in my career mostly doesn't live on any graph. It lives in conversations, in the things I didn't ship, in the people who didn't have to ask twice, in the bugs that never reached production, in the ideas I helped shape that have someone else's name on them. A graph cannot hold any of that. It was never built to.
The piece is the gap between those two things. A wall of green that means nothing, in front of a whole career that means everything, and no instrument on this site that can tell them apart.
The shape on the graph is what a tool can see. The space off the graph is what a tool cannot.
Both are me.
marks.txt— a single line, overwritten by each commitdraw.py— the script that produced the historyABOUT.md— plain-language notes for anyone who needs them- this README — the only writing in the repo that took time
The graph is public. The labor mostly isn't. Sometimes the labor isn't anything at all.