#   #       ####        ##    
  #######     ######     ######  
 ########## ##########  ## ## ###
### ### ### ### ## ### ##########
# ####### # ########## #  #  #  #
# #     # #   # ## #     # ## #  
             #      #   # #  # # 

Git invaders is the collection of software I will to maintain an infinitely scrolling space-invaders github contribution graph.

Yeah, I know, my github graph is the sacred record of my productivity, and I shouldn't mess around with it or people won't take me seriously. I'm sorry, but having had this idea, I can't not do it, so here's the deal:

I'm not going to contrive meaningless commits to make this work, all the work you see on the graph was real work done by me and committed to github.com, and not some cron job drawing pretty pictures by committing space changes.

tldr; I'm spoofing the timestamp of some of my commits so they look like they actually happened in the past. I'm only doing this on certain days when I need there to be a "blank spot" on my contribution graph. (The longer story of how this works is actually pretty cool, so you should read more (I even blogged the whole story if you have a few minutes)).

There are three pieces to this puzzle. The first is a Go program that models the 'invaders' data structure, and given epoch seconds for the day you start as arg1, it returns 0 if it's ok to git commit today, and 1 if it's not ok to commit today.

The second is a shell wrapper for git that intercepts my commit commands and, if I shouldn't commit to github today, it conspires with the system dynamic linker, and a C library that wraps the date-related system calls and lies to git about what day it currently is. Harsh I know. If today isn't a "blank day" or the command isn't commit, the shell wrapper just passes everything through unchanged to the real git client.

The third is the C shared object file that lies to the git client when it makes the requisite system calls to discover the system time. I kludged this up myself before discovering libfaketime, which is vastly superior, so I switched to using it instead.

Using the three of these together, the process is transparent to me on a day to day basis. I commit and push as I normally do, and my git client draws space invaders in my graph for me (As of Feb/March 2014, I'm just barely getting started, so it doesn't look like much yet). If you're interested in drawing something in your contributions graph, you should be able to clone this repo, and change the data structure inside the Go program to draw whatever sort of endlessly repeating pattern you'd like in your github graph. If you do, drop a comment in here, I'd love to see it!

It takes two arguments, a start day and 'today' in epoc seconds. You may omit the second argument and it'll assume you mean today IRL, but the start day is required. Simply put, tell it when you started, and it'll exit 0 if you should commit today, or 1 if you shouldn't. Tell it when you intend to start and some arbitrary day after that, and it'll exit 0 if you should commit that day or 1 if you shouldn't.

Install it like this:

go get github.com/djoephsen/Git-Invaders 

Run it like you started 1 month ago like this on Linux:

invaders $(date -d '1 month ago' +%s)

or like this on Darwin:

invaders $(date -v-1M +%s)

use it in a shell script like this:

if invaders ${START}; then echo YES!; else echo NO!; fi

This wrapper is intended to replace your git command (although you still need the original git binary so don't rm it. Check the header for system specific locations to things like libfaketime, and the real git binary etc..

I installed it like this:

echo [ -e "${GOPATH}/src/github.com/djosephsen/Git-Invaders/git-wrapper.sh" ] && alias git="${GOPATH}/src/github.com/djosephsen/Git-Invaders/git-wrapper.sh" > ~/.bashrc

Protip: If you export DEBUG, it'll give you debugging output so you can see it working.

The wrapper assumes you have libfaketime installed somewhere. What an awesome tool!

Caveat Emtor: I had trouble using their 'faketime' wrapper on OSX 10.9.1. My shell wrapper doesn't use their faketime wrapper and works fine for me on 10.9.1.