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What is the Arctic Vault program?

chintukarthi profile image Karthikeyan Dhanapal ・2 min read

This post is to cover the broader audience about the Arctic Vault program.

According to the Github Archive Program Site,

It is a hidden cornerstone of modern civilization and the shared heritage of all humanity. The mission of the GitHub Archive Program is to preserve open-source software for future generations.

When I first got the badge and looked into their website, I couldn't really understand what this is all about. So I didn't pay much attention to it for some time until my friend shared a video about the program.

Check this official video:

So this program is basically storing the precious open-source software and all the public repo's written in the open-source software languages for the future generation for almost 1000 years. Isn't it amazing?


Github took a snapshot as of 02/02/2020 and the data is stored in silver halide film and encoded to last for 1000 years.

During this pandemic situation, having this kind of safe storage of our open-source software for future generations is really a need of the hour.

I have a public repo of a gem called Data Store in rails which earned me an " Arctic Code Vault Contributor badge "

Arctic Code Vault Contributor Badge

And this is going to be stored in the vault for the future generation for 1000 years which makes me proud of myself as a developer 😇 and this kind of recognition make us give back to the community more often.

For more details of this program check the official page.

Image source: Github Archive Program

Discussion (3)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern • Edited

Since this really has virtually no real world affects, I think it shows how neat it is to do anything novel and clever. Like, much more impactful stuff, doesn't get a lot of discussion compared with something that's just kind of neat.

chintukarthi profile image
Karthikeyan Dhanapal Author

I agree that there are lot of impactful stuffs that needs discussion. But also we can't ignore the fact that we need to save the history. In today's world we never know what might happen next and this might not be the top most priority but yeah there are really important things that needs lot of discussion. 🙂

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Jonathan Boudreau

The impactful stuff is often intentionally "boring". Projects like Kubernetes and Linux use well known solutions to problems. What sets them apart is the execution, which is why there's such a large ecosystem built around them.