I’d like to use Beeminder to hold myself to committing to GitHub more regularly (as opposed to more total times).
An hour of work on some types of projects means many commits, while an equally productive hour of engagement on another project might only turn out a single commit. I’m already good at committing a whole lot occasionally, but I want to get better at staying engaged over a period of time.
So, the unit I’m trying to track isn’t so much ‘number of commits’ as ‘number of days with at least one commit’. I don’t want a 50-commit hour to disproportionately increase my buffer. I’d love to be able to say “every week, I want to have 5 days with at least 1 commit”.
With a premium account, I think I could approximate this by setting my goal to automatically retroratchet, or limit my safety buffer, or something, but then my graph would get pretty messy.
I could also make a Do More goal with git-days as the unit, but then I’d lose the automatic data entry.
Is there a better approach? If not, is there any chance this could be added to Gitminder? (If Gitminder were on github, I’d happily put together a pull request…)
You can do this today with the ‘binary’ aggregation method, applied to your gitminder goal.
That’s on the advanced settings tab; first convert the goal to ‘custom’ and then change the aggregation. Custom goals are a premium feature, at least partly because you’re less protected from tying your goal in knots with incompatible settings.
You can also do this by setting your aggregation method to 'binary’
But I think that also requires a premium account to modify the settings.
(Or you could try emailing support and asking nicely.)
Ah, never mind, I still can’t really use this, because I would want to track all commits to any repo in a specified organization. Right now it looks like the only options are “all my repos” (which I assume does not include organizations, even if I am an admin for them?) or one specific repo. #UVI
<looks down, shuffles feet> Umm, no, no documentation to speak of.
That’s probably not strictly true, but also part of why the dark-ish art of customising goals is premium. The hovertext and helptext on the page is often, umm, helpful. I sometimes look at our api documentation to get a hint as to what some of the fields are for.
It’s an excellent point that we could do with a blog-or-forum post outlining what knobs you can twiddle on a custom goal and why (and in what circumstances) you might want to change them from the default. That might even count as a #UVI, once we link it from the premium sign-up page and the custom-button.