Github, I love you. You have saved my company months of engineering time because of all the third-party libraries that we can easily find and use through your service. We're only a year old, so taking the time to build all those features from scratch would be a massive tax.
And this is just one of the many, many benefits. Soon you'll have 3M users, then 5M, then 10M... who knows how big it'll get.
Obviously the library authors make this happen and I mean no slight to them. They rock. But this thread is about Github so I focus my comments on how they add value.
Github made it easier to share code and created a community. Now more people share. Github standardized project formats (which dougws points out below). It's easier to figure out what's in a library.
This makes it easier for me to build complex apps. It saves my company gob loads of time & money. I fucking love Github and I fucking love people who use it to share high quality code that I don't have to recreate.
I second this. Even if the library is just an experiment by someone, has been dead for 6 months, and has a few bugs, it's still going to save our team at least a week and up to several months worth of development time. Time that as a startup is invaluable.
Github's project pages present a really nice, standardized, easy way to find out what a library does. I am always relieved when I find out that a 3rd-party python library I want to use is hosted on github, as it means I can very easily read the documentation, browse the source code, and examine outstanding issues.
I am simply amazed that there are 2 million software developers creating projects that they can host on Github. For some reason, I still think of open software development as a rather indie movement.
So much has changed just in the last few years :-)
True (my own company uses Github private repos for most of our work), but what's nice about that is that the barrier to transitioning a useful internal library into a reputation bolstering Open Source library is nearly zero.
I feel incredibly lucky to have started learning to code with resources like Github, Stack Overflow and Railscasts. It has made the process so much easier. Thank you, Github.
That's great news for Github, and truly as a community its a fantastic place to share and find code.
But recently I've really begun to question Git for version control, two recent experiences are really making me reconsider with its complexity outweighs its perceived usefullness. Its quite possible that for at least one of the projects I am involved in we will move back to SVN for the next version build.
Two projects now have had repeated problems with issues regressing and features being lost between builds. I had never considered it might be an issue with Git until someone else mentioned it to me. We need to do some proper investigation but at the moment under the gun to finish a release. When I have more details happy to share via support.
Does the ratio of users to repositories seem strange to anyone else? This to me looks like each user has around 1.5 repositories. This seems quite small?
On average most accounts I've seen have far more than 1 and a half repositories.
Why do people still think compete, quantcast, alexa, etc are accurate when they don't have tracking pixels installed on the sites they're showing traffic for?
There was an interesting comment recently on this topic, someone explained that some of the larger tracking companies purchase traffic logs from American ISPs and although their traffic reports aren't necessarily accurate (because they don't have all the data -- as shown by the github employee below) it's not complete guess work and they can be considered representative for sites used by the average internet user.
