We imagine building as a continuous act. The finished thing implies a steady hand moving from start to end. The calendar says otherwise.
Here is every day of this directory's life, one cell each. The darker a cell, the more commits landed that day. The pale gaps are the days no one touched it at all — and there are more of those than you would guess.
the one ringed cell is the busiest day of all — 20 commits, 25 May
the shape of the workLumps, not a line
The work does not spread evenly. It clumps. A fortnight in early spring goes almost dark — the directory barely touched while attention was elsewhere — and then a single day in late May takes twenty commits, an entire milestone landing at once. The average active day holds about five commits, but the average hides everything. There is no average day. There are quiet weeks and there are floods.
This is what attention looks like when you can finally see it: a scarce resource, arriving in bursts, around the edges of everything else a life contains.
a note on countingTwo honest numbers
The calendar above counts every commit that touched the directory: 311 of them, across 64 days. The Excavator, which runs the rest of this series, counts a little more strictly — it sets aside merge commits and reads 57 working days, not 64. Both are true. They are the same fact seen through two definitions of "a day's work," and the gap between them is itself a small lesson: even a number as plain as how many days did this take depends on what you agree to count.
core sample · src/app · the working calendar
Not one long sitting. Sixty-four short ones, scattered through a hundred and ten days, with a flood at the end and long silences in the middle.
The finished site looks like it was made in a single breath. It was made in the gaps between everything else.