While working on my thesis dissertation, I regularly commit changes to a code repository. This gives me peace of mind – I push the repository to a couple of different servers – and allows me to easily go back and recover things that I’ve deleted.
It has also made it possible for me to create an animated visual representation of my progress.
I submitted the link to Hacker News a couple of days ago and it made it to the front page for a couple of hours. Here’s a screenshot of it at number 11 (which is the highest it got as far as I know):
