
GitHub is the Best Thing Ever - blister
http://ericharrison.info/2010/05/28/github-is-the-best-thing-ever/
======
pook
We should make a Tiny Fork Day.

A day where X people fork, make at least one contribution, and request a pull.

Set up a cool site targetting people who are interested in coding, but haven't
yet gotten the courage to contribute, and you could have something.

~~~
steveklabnik
It's almost like a flash mob.

I like it.

~~~
DrSprout
HN needs to scale up the voting arrows for mobile. That was supposed to be an
upvote.

~~~
steveklabnik
No worries. I've done that a few times. Now I manually zoom almost every
time...

------
antirez
Yes, GitHub is wonderful. It makes contributions so trivial that it's worth to
pull even the littlest of the modifications. For instance:
[http://github.com/antirez/redis/commit/ca3f830b32a0a8303a5a7...](http://github.com/antirez/redis/commit/ca3f830b32a0a8303a5a761d6212925d9b5ac365)

Instead I think that an impressive amount of energy and work is often wasted
because many developers will design & code an important patch before getting
in touch with the author of some project. So the author will see a patch that
probably makes totally sense but is not what was desirable for some reason
(future directions, too bloat, there is a better way to do that).

If it's the kind of project where you can join some IRC channel or drop an
email to some mailing list and get in touch with one of the developers, it's
really a good idea before starting to code.

~~~
_glass
For trivial changes as describe in the article? I tend to disagree.
Decentralization saves you this administrative issues, like getting in touch
with people in advance, before they can see if you are really interested by
actually coding. I think it shows your value of this community if you are
contributing in the small at first if it is a larger project.

~~~
antirez
I wrote "... will design & code an important patch ...". For _important_
patches this is required, not for small changes.

~~~
_glass
Hm, I am sorry, but have to be picky about language: changes can be important
but trivial.

What I really meant: If this patch is easy and fast to produce, don't contact
the developer. Even if it is an important change.

------
spoon16
After reading this article I went ahead and forked the Konami-Unicorn-Blitz
project (the same one this article references). Added a hideAfter property
that autohides the unicorns after 30 seconds and submitted a pull request.
We'll see if the change is accepted :)

GitHub is neat.

~~~
blister
I accepted your patch... ;) John had already given me contributor access so I
went ahead and followed his lead. GitHub is excellent.

------
Loic
You do not need github to do that. You just need git and any git hosting.
Forking is just a clone, you push in your hosting (whatever it is) and ask the
guy on the other end to pull. No centralized control, real distributed
development.

Linux is developed like that every day. My own forge software
<http://indefero.net> is also developed like that, with forks on github, on
other instances of Indefero or just on 'hand rolled git hosting'.

So, the title should really be "Git (or any good distributed SCM) is the best
thing ever".

~~~
raganwald
Think of Github as a _discoverable user interface for git_. It has _visible
affordances_. Github is to Git as OS X is to Unix.

~~~
JadeNB
> It's the OS X of Unixes.

Sorry, but I think you mean that OS X is the OS X of Unixes, and GitHub is the
OS X of DVCSs.

~~~
raganwald
See how a web-based discoverable text editor makes collaborative editing easy?
:-)

Thanks!!!

------
endtwist
Funny, I put together a script just yesterday that allows you to do pull
requests from the command line (via git): <http://gist.github.com/415266>

Improvements always welcomed :)

------
icey
As an aside, I was writing some Ruby code last night and realized that mojombo
has written a _ton_ of really awesome gems.

~~~
mojombo
Thanks! I'm glad you like them!

------
dhotson
It's true, these small patches make me smile the most.

I had a contributor to a project of mine that basically just formatted the
README file. I certainly appreciated it.

It's nice knowing you're not coding in a vacuum.

------
AndrejM
The only thing I don't understand about github is that "hardcore archiving in
process..". I mean why do I have to wait a minute before I can start
downloading the archive? Isn't it costly if the server has to create an
archive every time someone requests a download?

~~~
mojombo
Archives are generated when they are requested and cached for fifteen minutes.
This cache length results in an average of 3.5GB of cached archives on disk at
any given time. We have to serve a large number of archives for arbitrary
revisions, so making you wait a few seconds for a tarball is currently the
best tradeoff. It's possible that in the future we will increase the cache TTL
(and the size of the cache) so that you are more likely to hit an already
generated archive.

~~~
AndrejM
That explains it. Thanks! (and I won't complain anymore :p)

------
rtomayko
The GitHub homepage had support for the Konami code with the commercial
launch, IIRC:

<http://github.com/site>

------
parbo
Or BitBucket if you're a Hg-person.

~~~
fierarul
Actually Github seems to have a much better marketing compared to BitBucket. I
would also imagine they are also quite larger.

I'm a Hg-person, but I was just thinking I could move my repositories from my
dedicated server to Github (via some git-hg plugin they wrote).

~~~
masklinn
Github was also first, I believe. I think many git-persons find there are
other services better than Github (in some areas they're interested in if not
all of them), but the brain/market share of Github makes it basically a
requirement.

~~~
grandalf
I've looked and the only other feature I've seen that may perhaps rival Github
is Joel's code review flow.

Would you mind mentioning specific features (other than ones that are part of
another dvcs) that you are referring to?

------
adulau
I'm sometime tempted to do a s/GitHub/gitorious/g

Especially that the gitorious.org software is free :

<http://gitorious.org/gitorious>

------
richcollins
I was just marveling how someone fixed doc typos shortly after we published
<http://github.com/stevedekorte/vertex.js>

------
ev0
It's exactly the same reason why I love GitHub. Got this moment when I forked
three20 when it first published on github, and contributed a little patch to
it for http auth.

------
Ixiaus
BitBucket is the Best Thing Ever too!

~~~
blister
Yeah. I like BitBucket as well. I'm just more of a Git guy right now, and all
of my favorite projects and people are on GitHub.

It's got a social-network lock-in effect for me right now. I can't leave and
go somewhere that has none of my friends. But boy, I love BitBucket's pricing.
I wish I could get at least 1 private repo on GitHub without paying a monthly
fee. It'd be nice to have a personal repo to store configuration files and
such that contain passwords... :(

Oh well.

------
barmstrong
sweet easter egg!

