Humbly started to use github on a daily basis only a year ago. It was one of the best decisions I made as a programmer. Being surrounded by so many talented people, so many great projects, reminds one that there will always be better coders out there and that collaboration is one of the best ways to improve hacking skills on all levels.
Slightly off topic but this project is listed in one the 'top lists' in the article and I haven't heard anything about it before: https://github.com/saltstack/salt
Looks interesting, a quick search on hnsearch shows a post from ~6 months ago that didn't seem to get any attention.
Anyone have any experience with salt in comparison to Chef/Puppet/Fabric setups?
I've deployed it for a former company as well as personally for a variety of projects. It's extremely quick to get up and running, and as libcloud integration gets better, it's been providing me with a cloud platform-neutral way of deploying/maintaining systems.
It requires less time invested than fabric for me. Most of the time, the batteries included in salt are enough. When they aren't, it's the same amount of work to maintain as fabric, but salt tends to save me some time building pieces fabric wouldn't provide.
If you maintain multiple linux distros, the templated config files make smoothing over differences in package names or locations a breeze.
If you need to maintain Windows-based stuff, salt can be setup against Windows Server in a manner that wasn't too painful. This was extremely handy when consolidating management of legacy windows stuff with newer linux stuff from the same web gui.
Speaking of web gui, I don't know of any that have significant steam for salt. That said, doing "import salt" in django/flask/$framework and receiving json or pickled data is pretty easy.
Well, I can vouch that it's pretty awesome. But I'm on the saltstack team, so I'm a bit biased. However, I can say that we get a daily stream of new users over in #salt on IRC and many of them find it preferable to Puppet and Chef.
I have no experience with Salt in a multi-server environment, but it feels speedy and is easy to customize. Lots of batteries are also included, which is why I picked it over Ansible.
The best thing about it for me was the simplicity of storing the configuration -- a bunch of YAML/JSON files that can even be synced over Dropbox/S3 if you want.
I've used it much more often in conjunction with http://bl.ocks.org. I think if there were a built-in interface for serving gists in that manner it'd see more use.
The spike in repository creation in July was from the PLD Linux Distribution joining GitHub. We're looking into the pull request spike in the spring, too.
