For the full Beeminder story, you could start with our inaugural blog post about akrasia and self-binding, a.k.a. commitment devices. If you know all about commitment devices — perhaps you know one of our competitors like StickK or GymPact — but don’t know what’s special about Beeminder, the secret is that we combine Quantified Self with commitment contracts. That means that (1) if you’re a lifehacking data nerd you’re going to adore us to pieces and (2) you can make commitment contracts that are based on data and much more flexible than with something like StickK.
Hackers in particular tend to like us a lot, and we just made it a lot easier to beemind your hacking.
At the risk of launching a thousand rants from the old neckbeard guard, it’s hard to imagine what writing code was like before git and GitHub came along. GitHub has made it really easy for people to collaborate on projects, and gives you some nifty stats to boot.
For some people, those shiny graphs are enough (and if that’s you, by all means, try out tenXer). But if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you’ve discovered that a little extra motivation can work wonders.
We’ve now made it really easy to beemind your GitHub progress, adding it to our list of integrations (we’re going to need a bigger boat). Thanks to Duke Leto for taking the lead on an early version of an integration with GitHub.
Both public and private repositories work — you authorize Beeminder to access the repository when you create the goal. Right now you can choose to track your commits to a repository or the number of issues you close. If there are other things or ways you can think of to track your progress, let us know in the comments (or hack something together with our API).
Beeminder will automatically update your graph from GitHub once an hour, so once it’s set up, just keep coding away and closing issues. And stay on the Yellow Brick Road.
