Git music

A while ago I wondered: would there be a correlation between the music I listen to, and the code I write? Do my listening habbits while programming differ from my regular listening habbits? Am I more productive while listening to a certain artist?

This should be easy enough to find out: Git knows when I have been programming, and Last.fm knows which tracks I have been listening to. All that was left to do, was cross-reference the data.

GitScrobbler

The next day, I hacked together GitScrobbler. It is a simple command-line program to which you pipe formatted git log output. It then retrieves the track that you listened to at the moment of the commit, using the Last.fm API. (An API-key is required to use the program.) When a commit is matched with a track, it prints the commit message along with the track title and artist. At the end, it prints some statistics like your top ten artists and the tracks most often committed to.

For me, the results were not as exciting as I had hoped. My top artists looked very much like my regular top artists (to within statistical fluctuations), but there definitely are a few tracks that I commit to more often than other tracks. The rest of the list again matched my regular listening habbits pretty well.