Discussion on retired commit feature of Enki

[jordanfish]

We’re very interested in hearing if you liked this feature and would like us to investigate a new (and more scalable) way of integrating your progress with GitHub, or with a personal profile.

This time, we’ll try not to get in trouble with GitHub.

[enphnt]

I already miss this feature. For me, it was a huge motivator to keep me going on a daily basis to see my progress recorded via github. I liked that it was all in one place with all my other code exercises.

When I would share this app around the office, the github integration feature was almost always the key selling point. It definitely sets the ENKI app apart from any others I use

[TheRealVira]

Visiting my GitHub-profile and seeing those nice green dots does definitely have some charms to it... Although it would be great if there also would be an external solution to that problem, I have to say that seeing my workouts on GitHub does boost my motivation. @enphnt really described my point of view. Maybe add an additional feature that allows us to share our finished workouts using GitHub (while also using your own solutions)?

[iMarv]

++
Seeing your own progress on your GitHub profile helps boosting motivation.

[subramaniashiva]

Github integration was a big motivator for me. Would be nice if we can get the feature back.

[xdevs23]

What about doing commit --amend whenever possible and do a force push when e.g. updating the leaderboards so that you dont have many many commits doing the same thing. Git GC runs every now and then, cleaning up the repo and removing dangling commits.

[geekmuse]

What if initiation of the feature forks a repo under the enki account into our personal account, and progress is tracked against the forked repo in our own account? Then you're still able to see who's using it (by looking at forks of the base repo), and progress tracking repos are smaller because they're atomic at the user level. Since the repos would be public, you could hook into GH's API to generate leaderboards, etc.

[mathieudutour]

@xdevs23 we still need one commit per day per user to have the github streak

@geekmuse Yes that's a possibility. There is a something to consider though: we would need to ask write access to your public repo. Would you mind? Of course we wouldn't do anything else that accessing your commit repo but it could be hard to explain this to someone who doesn't already know what is the commit repo

[xdevs23]

Well, i mean the leaderboard updates of that enkibot...

[mathieudutour]

oh yeah but it's 1 commit per day is nothing compared to the thousands coming from the users :)

[xdevs23]

Would shrink down the size of the repo a little bit tho

[jordanfish]

@mathieudutour Can you share exactly what Alex from GitHub said to you about the creation pattern? Just to give better understanding for what we have to avoid.

[almoore]

I agree with geek muse that using a forked repo with each personal account would be better. You app could submit automatic issue requests on improvement or feedback and make use of the gist features.
This is really a feature that would be better tracked by a database and using something like firebase would be a great scalable way to do that. They have a javascript API that would work easily with what you already have.

[geekmuse]

@mathieudutour No, not at all -- I would generally view that as a very fair ask of a service/app that's doing something like what you are doing (of course, you guys have a bit of a challenge conveying that to new users concisely from the app UI when asking someone to allow it).