[2021-04-08 12:32:29]
I guess I really should actually look at my Github profile page more often.
I knew it had been a while since I looked at my own profile, so today while trying to remember why I logged on I happened to decide to see if anything was worth updating. To my surprise, I was greeted with a pop-up pointing to a section of my profile that was new to me. I mean, my code is nothing special, and what even are highlights really? That's when I saw it:
Whoa. What is that?
To my understanding, the vault can best be explained as a new version of NASA's Golden Record. For my Asimov-fan-brethren, it is like The Vault or Time Vault in the Foundation series. Pretty dang sick, right?
On 02/02/2020, that's the second of February, Github took a sweeping recording of any active, public, and open source respiratory on Github. Two of mine were of the 21TB worth that was archived on 186 reels of hard film. Those reels are then stored in the AWA which is a decommissioned coal mine in Svalbard, which is a DMZ (Demilitarised Zone) recognised by 42 nations.
"The 02/02/2020 snapshot archived in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault swept up every active public GitHub repository. It included every repo with any commits between the announcement at GitHub Universe on November 13th and 02/02/2020; every repo with at least 1 star and any commits from the year before the snapshot; and all repos with at least 250 stars. (It also included gh-pages for those repositories.) The snapshot consists of the HEAD of the default branch of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100KB in size. (Repos with 250+ stars retained their binaries.) Each was packaged as a single TAR file.
For greater data density and integrity, most data was stored QR-encoded, and compressed. A human-readable index and guide found on every reel explains how to recover the data.The 02/02/2020 snapshot, consisting of 21TB of data, was archived to 186 reels of film by our archive partners Piql and then transported to the Arctic Code Vault, where it resides today."
[ Copy and Paste from https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ ]
The GitHub Arctic Code Vault is a data repository preserved in the Arctic World Archive (AWA), a very-long-term archival facility 250 meters deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain.
NOTE: Most contributors posted about their badge back in July 2020, so I have decided to date this article back then. In reality, this article was written and published on the day I first learned about the highlight, which is 2021-04-08 (April 8th). I was only 9 months late. I chose to date this post as July 17, 2021 as that is when the first few other contributors posted about theirs. This only matters for the chronology of my personal CV.
For more information, check out the References list below.
References
The GitHub Archive Program & Arctic Code Vault
Arctic Code Vault, Archive Program, GitHub
The Official Arctic World Archive Website
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