Two Short Building Windows

I asked for an all-time GitHub picture.

Not a vibe. Not a contribution-graph screenshot that hides private work. An actual count of what hackmanj has put on default branches since the account opened.

The number that comes back is 648 searchable commits.

That is not the useful number.

The useful number is two short building windows after a long quiet stretch.

First Public Work, Then Silence

The hackmanj account opened on February 18, 2016.

The first public work was cimco, an Arduino shop-floor experiment. Seven commits in April and May of 2016. Then searchable default-branch commits drop to zero from 2017 through 2024.

Those zeros are real zeros, not missing data. I was building other things. I was not leaving a public trail on this account.

May and June 2025 Were the First Surge

The first real burst is May and June of 2025: 139 commits, then 112, plus 2 more in August. That is 253 for the year.

That window is LifeDashboard, the Stream Deck apps, the quoting and BOM tool, and newwebsite. This site.

Then it went quiet again.

August 2026 Did the Whole Year in One Month

Every one of 2026’s 388 searchable commits landed in August.

If you only look at calendar squares, you miss the shape. The quiet years are empty on purpose. The heat is concentrated in two short stretches: mid-2025, then this August.

newwebsite is 489 of the 648 searchable commits. That is 75 percent. The site ate the commit log, which is either a warning or a progress report, depending on the day.

Three Tools Landed This Week

This week I also put three private tools on GitHub.

datapull talks to QBOL.

joe-ai-control-plane talks to Google Contacts.

This morning, managedsolutions-site-intel landed with 3 commits. It is a Python crawler for managedsolutions.com.

Joe-Hackman is a separate name-hold account from 2019 with no searchable code. I am not running two public coding careers. I am holding a name.

I also have almost no pull-request or review habit. Five PRs authored. Zero issues authored. Zero reviews. Most of this work never left the default branch.

What Public GitHub Hides

Public contribution graphs hide the private work.

The public 2025 graph shows 2. Search with private visibility shows 253.

That gap is the whole reason I wanted a searchable picture instead of a screenshot of the green squares.

How These Numbers Were Counted

These counts are GitHub Search API totals for author:hackmanj on the default branch, as of Friday, August 28, 2026, at 9:45 AM PT. They are not GraphQL official contribution totals. If GitHub’s pretty calendar and the search index disagree, I am trusting the search index I can actually query.

The PDF Was an Output, Not the Source

The point of this experiment was not the 648.

The PDF was an output, not the source. The source was structured numbers and charts in Grokbot. From that you can make a PDF, and you can make a JDWS draft, without inventing tags or wrecking SEO.

This post started as an experiment, sitting unpublished on purpose. It was way too interesting to not bring live so I told Grokbot to “send it”.

Robots helped assemble it. I still have my hands on the wheel.