DEPRECATED: I no longer use this application, and it no longer works due to changes by Google to the requirements for Chrome etxensions.
This is a Chrome extension that looks at your GitHub notifications inbox and tries to guess how long it will take you to respond to new ones, then posts this information to your profile status:
I participate in many threads on GitHub, mostly on account of maintaining a large number of projects which receive issues and pull requests. I value taking the time to respond to all of them (or at least the ones that require action) in a reliable manner. On the other hand, my time is limited, and I don't find it enjoyable to spend all day reading email. To address this problem, I reserve one hour each day for doing chores like email, and anything that's not finished I take care of the next day. What this means is that low-priority chores like hard-to-address GitHub threads may wait a fair while before I can get to them, depending on what else is going on. I figured it would be nice if people had an idea of how timely a response they should expect from me. (But mostly, this project is because I realized I could apply a complicated technical solution to a problem that didn't really need one, and I love doing that.)
I abuse the GitHub notifications API. Normally, it's supposed to represent whether I've seen a notification. Instead, I make it represent whether I've acted on the notification (by responding to it, by making a code change, or by looking at it properly and deciding that no response is needed). Here is how the Chrome extension estimates my response time:
- Fetch successive pages of GitHub notifications until finding a page that is at least 90% read notifications.
- Determine the overall fraction of all these notifications that are unread, say 70%.
- Look at the timestamp of the notification at that percentile, in the previous example the notification 70% of the way down the list sorted from newest to oldest.
- Compute the duration from that notification's timestamp to the current date.
- Multiply by 3/2. This is what I report as my estimated response time.
Why multiply by 3/2? I want to account for the problem of spikes in response time. Sometimes I become busy with non-email-related chores, and go for a while without responding to any email. In this case, it's impossible to know how long it will be until I start responding again. However, if it's been five days since I stopped responding, on average with no extra information we can assume it will be five days until I start again (this is from some results in Bayesian probability theory). On the other hand, if there are five days of email in my inbox as a steady state, we can expect it will take new emails five days to make their way to the front of the queue. Combining these figures and accounting somewhat for the overestimate (maybe I will start processing email quickly soon) results in a guess of 7 1/2 days. (Notice that the heuristic is based on wild speculation and not actual data or any solid reasoning.)
It's a Chrome extension which uses a combination of GitHub cookies and a personal access token to do its work. The extension saves a timestamp to prevent running more often than every six hours. When it does run, it starts by using a personal access token to fetch notifications from the GitHub API v3. Then it computes your profile status and makes some hacky POST requests to GitHub.com to update it (this functionality is not exposed through the API). Optionally, the extension can hit a webhook after a successful run. I use Dead Man's Snitch to be notified if the updater stops working.
Unfortunately, this approach will probably not work for you, unless you happen to be abnormally similar to me. It only works subject to the following constraints:
- You can commit to not viewing any thread on GitHub until you're ready to deal with it right then.
- You can disable GitHub's tracking pixels on every platform on which you read email, or can commit to never opening GitHub's notification emails.
- You process emails in a similar manner to me (namely, you put in a similar amount of work on it each day and roll over remaining emails to the next day).
- You are on GitHub.com more or less every day, so the extension can update your profile in the background.
(This section is at the end because you probably shouldn't be installing this application unless you have a clear understanding of the constraints that its design imposes on you in order to get good data.)
The repository is an unpacked Chrome extension. Basically, you go to
chrome://extensions, turn on developer mode, click "Load unpacked",
and select the repository. You have to click the refresh button on the
extensions page whenever you pull an update.
Right-click on the extension icon in the Chrome menu bar and go to the
options page. You need to generate a GitHub personal access token with
the notifications scope and fill that in. This is also where you can
put in your webhook URL if you want to use that. (Highly recommended,
as the script makes no attempt whatsoever to report errors.)