This is really annoying and I wanted to share my experience.
I was working on a private repository for several months and making commits almost daily. Most of my GitHub activity came from that project and you could see a nice green pattern in my contribution chart from June through July.
Then suddenly I got kicked out of the project (it’s complicated) and now my entire contribution history from that repo vanished from my GitHub profile. It looks like I barely coded at all during those months even though I was working hard every day.
The worst part is that the application is still running in production with my code in it. But since the repository is private and I can’t access it anymore, GitHub doesn’t show any of my work.
I think GitHub should find a way to keep showing contributions that people actually made, even when they lose access to private repositories later. Has anyone else dealt with this problem?
Yeah, this is just how GitHub works with private repos and there’s no way to fix it after the fact. GitHub only shows contributions from repos you can still access, so losing access wipes that activity from your profile. Same thing happened to me when I left my last company - lost access to all their private repos where I’d been pretty active. What helped was keeping backup repos and running some public projects alongside the private work. Won’t fix your current situation, but going forward you might want to keep personal forks or side projects that show your coding activity. The contribution graph matters for showing consistency, but decent employers usually look past the green squares when they’re actually evaluating you.
i totally feel ya! last year i lost my contributions too bc of a similar situ. now i just fork my work to show some activity, even if it’s just dummy commits. such a hassle but gotta keep that green graph going, right?
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