GitGarden

Framing the Problem

What is the problem you are trying to solve? Who does it affect?

GitHub activity is usually shown as raw numbers or a contribution heatmap, which is informative but not emotionally engaging. This affects students, developers, and recruiters who want a quick, memorable way to understand coding consistency and profile health.

Idea Explanation

What is your idea? How does it fix the problem?

GitGarden converts GitHub activity into a “living garden” concept with clear metrics and a Bloom Percentage score. It makes profile activity easier to interpret by combining contributions, commits, push events, and repositories into one visual and one simple score.

Implementation

How do all the pieces fit together? Does your frontend make requests to your backend? Where does your database fit in?

The app is built with React + TypeScript + HTML.

Frontend takes a GitHub username and fetches data from GitHub APIs (users, repos, events, commit search) plus a yearly-contributions API for better totals.

It computes dashboard stats and Bloom Percentage client-side, then renders cards and yearly breakdowns.

Current version has no backend/database yet; data is fetched live from public APIs.

Challenges

What did you struggle with? How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge was data accuracy and metric meaning. Contribution totals from recent events were undercounting for some users, so we added a yearly totals source, retries, and fallbacks. We also handled UI issues (sticky nav, overflow/extra scrollbar, responsive layout) while keeping the design consistent.

Accomplishments

What did you learn? What did you accomplish?

We built a working end-to-end product: polished landing page, interactive dashboard, yearly contribution tracking, total commits, push events, and Bloom Percentage. We also improved data reliability, clarified metric naming (contributions vs commits vs push events), and prepared reusable animated garden assets for richer visuals.

Next Steps

What are the next steps for your project? How can you improve it?

Integrate tree/grass/flower animations directly into the dashboard (currently blank garden area).

Add a backend cache to reduce API failures and rate-limit issues.

Support GitHub OAuth/token-based requests for higher reliability.