The Quantified Programmer

Expanding on the thoughts in my last blog post about measuring opposing indicators I wanted to explore things from a different perspective.

There is a growing community of people that measure and record as much as they possibly can about themselves.  This quantified Self movement is predominantly focused on health related aspects exemplified by the growing market for activity trackers like FitBit.  The more information you have to track yourself the more you are able to identify longer term trends that would otherwise be twisted by your own fallible perception.

Programmers strangely do not have much going on for measuring themselves.  Even though it would be quite easy to glean information from the coding output from any programmer.

I would be quite interested to see a collection of stats about myself.  A daily digest of basic productivity, and charts of longer term trends would be motivating and insightful.  Would lines of code per day increase as I got better at a new language/framework?  Would there be plateaus in my productivity? Could I identify the impact of distractions? How much more productive am I working from home vs. at the office?  There are so many questions that would have valuable answers for me personally in my quest to improve.

While no measurement is going to be perfect, by measuring myself against myself, for personal insight provides some incentive not to cheat and keeps the relative performance as an informative metric.

GitHub provides a decent API which could be used to dive in and gather this information.  It would be interesting to launch a service that could mine through a user’s github account to generate a detailed productivity report.

Unfortunately another project I don’t have the time to build myself.  If someone else builds it though. I would surely be a paying customer.