I'm the #50 most active contributor on Github, so what?

Today, Paul Miller released a nice list of the "Most active GitHub users".

People started to talk about it and suddenly I received a lot of congratulations messages for being the #50 most active contributor on Github.

I was pretty surprised, since there's almost 2 million users on Github and even because Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, was behind me!

That was pretty nice for my ego, but let me explain what this ranking means for me.

Quantity != Quality

The first thing is, I'm not better than anyone.

Just because I made 100 commits more than Linus, it doesn’t make me a better contributor than him. Actually I could do 10,000 commits more than him and I would still not being a better contributor.

The only thing that these numbers shows is: those people on the list put a lot of effort on open source using Github.

And this is true, I definitely had a tough year working on some many different projects out there.

People just don't get "commits"

We all have a lot of tasks to do daily, so how to deal with them using Git?

Let's say you have a task called "Redesign my blog".

Some people start coding it, making a lot of changes and when it's finished: git add . && git commit -m "Redesigned my blog".

This is so wrong. What happens if you want to revert just a single improvement that was not so good there? You'll need to revert the whole commit.

That's why you have to break your tasks into sub tasks. It seems like a basic thing, but people just don't do it.

1st place

If I had to guess who's going to be in the top of this list, that would be TJ (@visionmedia).

He's doing an incredible job in the NodeJS community, so congratulations man, you deserve it :)