I read an interesting post by Curtis McHale today highlighting his pledge to maintain a daily contribution to open-source projects. Well done Curtis! It's developers like him that make the open source projects that many of us use possible.

While I don't currently contribute to open source projects (I really should), one thing that I looked at was the contribution streak for Github. The streak is the number of days you make a contribution to projects on Github. To maintain the streak you need to make a contribution every day. If you miss a day, the streak resets to zero. The question I have is, does it include weekends?

I was in a similar position a couple of years ago. I started using 750words.com to write daily. Every day I tried to squeeze in 750 words of writing in my day. It wasn't easy, but I managed to do it daily for a good couple of months. Then the fatigue started to set in. Finding time at the weekend was becoming difficult.

In the end I decided that maintaining this amount of writing everyday wasn't feasible. So I stopped. I can tell you that while writing every day was great, the relief of not having to write was great too. I didn't feel bad about it.

While I'm not writing everyday now, I am trying to publish a blog post every weekday. It leaves me the weekend to reflect on the last week and get some ideas in place for the following week. The same goes for an open source project I am about to start. Yes I might work on it at the weekend, but I'll mostly be working on it during the week.

Maintaining streaks like this are fun, but trying to fit them in seven days a week can be difficult too. I know for a fact that I'll never accumulate a streak of more than five on Github, but I'm happy with that. Sometimes I need the weekend to be a code-free time.