I Love GitHub Two

I’d been meaning to write a quick article about GitHub, but then Mike and Neil beat me to it and stole most of the best bits. Read both of those articles then come back if you want. I agree whole heartedly.

Now I’ve used public hosted source control before. But Google Code, Sourceforge or Launchpad never felt like this. Their were always their for people to download your code if they wanted. Maybe you collaborated with a few people on a specific project. But GitHub, through a combination of neat visualisations and social features, is encouraging people to just upload all their code. All those lines of throw away scripts. All that code written on the train learning a new language. All that configuration stuff that normally gets missed.

Talk of emerging programming languages often shifts to the need for a killer application. I want to learn more about Git so I can do more with GitHub. For me, that makes GitHub a likely driving force behind a sea of Git adoption in the coming year or so. I’m also interested to see what comes out of a reasonable sized network of like-minded people absentmindedly hacking away. Already I’m seeing people branch other peoples code within my network of contacts. Often just small tweaks and changes - like a code fairy cleaning up a few rough edges or adding an extra line here.

So, if you write code head over to GitHub and signup. Create a few repositories of the things you’re hacking on at the moment and jump through the pre-portable-social-network dance just one more time. I promise it’s worth it this time.