Ever wondered what kind of kitten your Github repo would be?
Well, okay, maybe you didn't, but it doesn't hurt to know. On a more serious note, gittens provides a way to size up a Github repo at a glance. How mature is it, how well-maintained? It has probably happened to you too: you're looking for a library, find two that do the exact same thing and they look kind of equal in most ways. Looking at the gitten of the repo, though, the differences will suddenly seem striking. Check out, say, peter-murach/github and octokit/octokit.rb and see for yourself!
The age of the gitten is determined by how long the repo has been around: they may be newborn (like gittens itself at the time of writing), but there are some truly senior gittens around too.
The physical size of the repo detemines the size of the gitten; sometimes useful to know before cloning.
The more contributors the repo has, the more colorful the gitten will be.
A gitten is as well-fed as the repo is well-maintained: too many open issues, unmerged pull-requests, and a slow rate of dealing with them will make the gitten feel hungrier and hungrier for attention.
People actively working on the repo will make the gitten more and more active. Repos untouched since ages will sport hibernating gittens, like activerecord-hackery/squeel for example, and actively developed projects will have a playful, active gitten.
The more attention and stars the repo gets, the more amused the gitten will become.
Gittens provides badges to include in your repo README, so you can show off your cute gitten to everyone. These badges feaure a short description of the gitten, based on it's two most important or outstanding qualities, making it even easier to get a feel for the state of the repository.
If you see you know there are issues needing attention for sure, but there hasn't been any activity in a long time.
But if you see you know it's and old repository with lots and lots of contributiors, and since these are it's two standout traits, the other areas should be okay, so it's probably an actively developed and nicely maintained repository.
The ratings assigned to gittens are calculated by highly sophisticated algorithms developed by kitty scientists in an underground fortress on the Moon.
The app uses the Github API to get data about repos, and since it doesn't require any sort of login it's possible that you'll run into the Github API rate limits.
The badges are generated by shields.io, and the ASCII kittens were inspired by melaniecebula/cat-ascii-faces.