I have been wanting to keep daily portraits of myself but never get around to it because it seems like more hassle than good to insert yet one more habit into my day that I have to remind myself to do. This actually solves it brilliantly by putting it on auto-pilot all the while providing meaningful capture times, plus git bisect could have a whole new dimension.
I think there's potential for analysis tools on top of it, though I think this stuff should be private (at least to the team) lest we create more data for companies and governments. With that in mind, I think integration with git-annex[1] as a plugin to backup the photos would be really interesting. Or it could already work, honestly I am yet to look into how git-annex works in practice, but from it's concept I know it's gonna be the right backup solution for some types of data I have (e.g. audio recordings, for which I currently use Evernote out of convenience.)
EDIT: So I tried to set it up, and I installed ruby gems in such a way that it needs sudo-everything. So sudo gem install lolcommits made me have to sudo lolcommits --enable. Doesn't necessarily bother me but I guess the program doesn't have access to save the snapshots and it may be failing silently (since no ~/.lolcommits was created after my first commit with it.) I haven't tried lolcommits --browse nor lolcommits --last because I'm using xmonad and I assume they are gonna try to open something back in my Ubuntu desktop which will leave me in an interface limbo. Author might want to keep the command line helper more agnostic, e.g. 'lolcommits browse' cd's you to the directory, and 'lolcommits browse -g' pops open your gui file manager.
Since all commits are stored in a directory, './lolcommits', and it's triggered when you make a commit, it seems like it would be straightforward to create a post commit hook that adds the new image to git-annex, especially as the filename is the commit's hash. Alternatively, you could simply use the assistant to watch the directory and sync it for you. So there's no need for built-in git-annex integration, though it would make it nicer.
So I started working on something like this a year or so ago, mine is not as pretty as lolcommits though: http://gitshots.ranman.org/ (source is here: https://github.com/ranman/gitshots ) -- it uses mongo as the backend which was probably not the best choice in the world but it lets you do some cool stuff with the data.
I've been using this for about a year or so on my spare time trying-to-start-a-startup project. It's pretty fun to scroll through ~500 images of myself. I was thinking I may upload the whole series online eventually for people to laugh at my bad hair days
Since their stored in '~/.lolcommits', I don't think this could really impact any production projects. I think it could be pretty funny, especially for non-side projects.
I admire your dedication to ensuring all code is serious and no superfluous fun is permitted.
Have no fear, you can actually use lolcommits as a management tool in order to audit your workplace and make sure everyone is appropriately miserable. Anyone caught smiling or laughing while committing can then be fired for not being serious enough while coding.
I think there's potential for analysis tools on top of it, though I think this stuff should be private (at least to the team) lest we create more data for companies and governments. With that in mind, I think integration with git-annex[1] as a plugin to backup the photos would be really interesting. Or it could already work, honestly I am yet to look into how git-annex works in practice, but from it's concept I know it's gonna be the right backup solution for some types of data I have (e.g. audio recordings, for which I currently use Evernote out of convenience.)
[1]: http://git-annex.branchable.com/
EDIT: So I tried to set it up, and I installed ruby gems in such a way that it needs sudo-everything. So sudo gem install lolcommits made me have to sudo lolcommits --enable. Doesn't necessarily bother me but I guess the program doesn't have access to save the snapshots and it may be failing silently (since no ~/.lolcommits was created after my first commit with it.) I haven't tried lolcommits --browse nor lolcommits --last because I'm using xmonad and I assume they are gonna try to open something back in my Ubuntu desktop which will leave me in an interface limbo. Author might want to keep the command line helper more agnostic, e.g. 'lolcommits browse' cd's you to the directory, and 'lolcommits browse -g' pops open your gui file manager.