Keeping your Github profile up to date and maintaining the heat-map is far more important in the digital age than most people realize. One of the first things your prospective employer's background checking team looks at is your Github profile. And when they do that, better hope they see an activity heat-map similar to this!
Believe it or not but most people don't really catch up to this. You could be one of the best programming gems in this world and still your github heat-map could suffer from irregular activity, a real pity if your prospective employer rejects you for that.
Like other things in life, maintaining something over the long run requires care and kaizen (continuous improvement over time) and this one is no different. There are many ways to maintain your activity map on github, below are some of them:
1) Fully automated script. This works seamlessly but its the easy dude's way out! If you're a resourceful coder, then creating a simple bash script (or batch file on windows) to update a random repo should be a piece of cake for you, all you need is something like:
git add . && git commit -m "test commit" && git push
And then you can set this as a user level cron job in linux (crontab -e) or a scheduled task on windows, so it keeps doing this on a daily basis.
But this approach has a few problems. Firstly, you don't feel like doing anything substantial and this might further worsen your impostor syndrome (which is already a serious problem among engineers!). Secondly, its a great idea if your github activity also results in something useful or productive (such as a software release!) thus hitting two birds with one stone.
Having said that, you way probably still want to keep this as a backup approach - say you're leaving on a vacation or sabbatical where you don't want to be disturbed by work, you can enable this cron or scheduled task in such situations.
2) Maintain a blog repository. This is one of my favorite ways of maintaining a github heat-map! My own website cum blog prahladyeri.com is hosted on github, so each time I make a post, the activity map on my profile gets updated too!
Of course, the downside is that its practically difficult to come up with new content or article each day. To be honest, it has been quite a few months since I've updated my own blog!
3) Maintain a list repository. Another simple and straightforward way of maintaining your github activity is to simply start an repository consisting of one or more informative lists in markdown format. It could be a list of anything related to your hobby or craft like health and nutrition, reading and writing, self help, psychology, computer programming, etc.
It could also be a general or assorted list of multiple things. In fact, this is the exact approach I've taken by maintaining a repo called Curated Lists. The advantage of this approach is that you not only maintain your repo but also keep producing some useful content along the way!
4) Work on that side project. Whenever you feel like coding something as a hobby or side project, just do it on github! This is probably the most obvious approach used by most people and fits with Github's core purpose too. After all, this is exactly what code hosting facilities like Github are built for!
5) Create an issue. If you come across an issue or bug while using an open source software, check whether they have maintained a Github repo (most of them almost always have it these days). Then all you have to do is create an issue on their issue tracker! Each issue you report or comment you make on Github also adds to your activity on profile. The only exception is that the activity you perform on private (closed source) repositories isn't counted on the heat-map but I don't know if that rule has also changed lately.
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