Well we’re in the midst of the Young Rewired State Festival Of Code weekend here at the Custard Factory in Birmingham and one of the amazing by-products of all the hacking is the power of Open Source and the awareness and use of Github — the latter is largely down to great work by Ashley Williams and others this week, running git and Github workshops for the kids during the week in various centres, including ours (MadLab).

Github Commit Data

Anyway, I was curious and so put together a spreadsheet tracking all of the 2013 hacks that had declared a Github repo in their information pages. You can see that there are a massive number of kids not only hacking code but sharing it with the world:

I wrote some Google Apps Script to poll the Github API, pulling commit info, and writing it to a Google spreadsheet.

Visualise It Yourself

I’ve also made the data available as JSON (again, using the power of a little Google Apps Script), as I know that you can do a lot better than me visually. The data is here:

http://bit.ly/YRS2013HacksOnGithub

so please be my guest and put some more visualisations together. Let’s see who can come up with the nicest representation this weekend.

Source Code

The Google Apps Script source code that I used for this is available via a couple of gists on Github:

https://gist.github.com/qmacro/6199968 – retrieve and store commit counts

https://gist.github.com/qmacro/6199973 – expose a sheet as JSON

Share & Enjoy!