commit-art

commit-art paints words and pixel art onto a GitHub contribution graph with backdated commits.

It began with one stray commit dated 1970-01-01, which unlocked every contribution-year tab back to the Unix epoch. A reasonable engineer runs git rebase; I filled the empty decades instead, one thing almost everyone remembers per year, from UNIX in 1970 to CHATGPT in 2022, where my real commits take over. 53 years, one signature each.

GitHub colours a contribution cell by a commit's author date, not its push time. Set the date, make an empty commit, and that day lights up. The grid is 7 rows, Sunday to Saturday, by about 52 week-columns a year; commit-art renders text in a 5×7 bitmap font, or a named icon, into that grid and writes one empty commit per lit day. A commit only counts if its email is verified on the account and it sits on the default branch of a public, non-fork repo.

There are two implementations. The original is Python with Pillow and renders any TrueType text or image down to 7px. The Go rewrite uses go-git, so it needs no external git, and embeds the font and the timeline; both are generated from the Python gallery, so the two never drift.

Git refuses author dates before 1970-01-01 or after 2099-12-31, so the canvas is 130 years wide. The finished sheet is SvnFrs/contribution-graph ↗; the year tabs on my GitHub profile show it.