Github Forks and Contributions
As I worked on building my personal brand and studying frontend programming languages, I started to practice less and less of Ruby. I didn’t want my knowledge of this popular backend language to fade, so I decided to enforced what I currently knew and add onto it with exercises.
I forked a Ruby Koans repository on GitHub and started working away, commiting my changes when needed so that I could keep track of my progress. However, going back and looking at my contributions, I have noticed that none of it has changed. Why was this? According to GitHub Docs, it was because I had made a commit in a forked repository.
This actually makes sense. If the commits in a forked repo were counted towards my contributions, I would receive double the contributions if I were to create a pull request.
In my case, I never planned on merging with the master branch since there is no finished product — these exercises were purely for learning, so they wouldn’t count towards my contributions. But what about tracking my progress?
Well, it’s still possible. I would have to contact GitHub support to detach the fork and make it a standalone repository.
After a few minutes of my request, I was approved and my contributions were showing up as expected.
Hooray!
