The story behind GitLife

The idea of visualizing your life as a grid of weeks has been floating around the internet for years — bots, articles, posters. One image: your entire life on a single page, ~4,000 cells.

GitHub's contribution graph shows activity for the past year. GitLife stretches that idea across your entire life — from birth to estimated death.

That's GitLife. No grand mission, no startup pitch. Just a different way to look at your time.

Public commits are fetched via GitHub API by username. Sign in with GitHub to include private commits too. No access to your code or repositories.

The life expectancy calculator uses 21 factors from epidemiological studies. Every factor links to its DOI — a permanent link to the published paper. You can verify every number.

Country-level baseline life expectancy comes from World Bank data (217 countries).

No analytics. No ads. No tracking pixels. Without sign-in, nothing is stored. Sign in with GitHub to save your profile and join the leaderboard.

The code is MIT licensed and public on GitHub. You can read exactly what it does.

Next.js 16 (App Router), Better Auth (GitHub OAuth), Drizzle ORM, Neon Postgres, shadcn/ui v4, Tailwind CSS v4, next-intl.

7 languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese.

GitLife is open source and built to be easy to contribute to. Here's what you can do:

• +Add famous developers — the list is a JSON array with GitHub username, birth year, and country. If someone is missing — add them.
• +Add a language — each translation is one JSON file in messages/. Copy any existing one and translate.
• +Improve life expectancy factors — find a peer-reviewed study with a DOI? Add a new factor or refine an existing one.
• +Fix bugs — found something broken? Grid rendering, mobile layout, wrong data — PRs for fixes are always welcome.
• +Build features — scale selector, better tooltips, data export, new visualizations. Check the issues for ideas or propose your own.

The whole codebase is standard Next.js + TypeScript. Data lives in plain JSON files. No complex setup needed.