The GitHub Blog: Watercooler

Ruby on Rails is moving to Git and GitHub. Super cool.

I particularly like the comment from AkitaOnRails:

Right now, everybody is playing catch-up with Git, Git-svn and Github, no question about that.

Most of the projects that formerly lived in Rails’ SVN repository have already made the switch to GitHub: Prototype, Scriptaculous, and Capistrano.

And let’s not forget the awesome, high profile projects already using GitHub: Merb, RSpec, DataMapper, and of course Nu and Io. Can’t wait to see who joins next!

Update: Fixed Prototype link. Whoops!

Things have been quiet around here lately as we prepare for the launch. We’re doing a lot of work on the backend to ensure we will be stable and swift moving forward. More on this soon.

In the meantime, you can now enjoy two of my favorite languages right here on GitHub: Nu and Io.

Here’s a description of Nu straight from programming.nu:

Nu is an interpreted object-oriented language. Its syntax comes from Lisp, but Nu is semantically closer to Ruby than Lisp. Nu is implemented in Objective-C and is designed to take full advantange of the Objective-C runtime and the many mature class libraries written in Objective-C. Nu code can fully interoperate with code written in Objective-C; messages can be sent to and from objects with no concern for whether those messages are implemented in Objective-C or Nu.

Follow Tim Burks or check out his Nu repo to watch for updates.

Io is also great, and incredibly dynamic. Really, it puts Ruby to shame in the metaproggin’ department. From iolanguage.com:

Io is a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects, all messages are dynamic), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).

Follow Steve Dekorte or check out his Io repo to watch it progress.

Rob Hudson and a few co-workers recently tried to build a full fledged Django app in 3 hours using Git and GitHub. Really, it’s a match made in heaven: an agile web framework like Django, an amazing scm like Git, and an awesome collaboration tool like GitHub.

Check out the article to hear it in Rob’s words:

In summary, we have had an enlightening evening that has changed the way we think about our coding practices. And we’re all switching to using git and GitHub personally. I encourage everyone who is interested in the future of coding to give git a try, and sign up on GitHub (via an invite or when it launches) and share your code.

I completely agree!

We’ve moved our bug tracking and feature requests to [Lighthouse](http://lighthouseapp.com).

Thanks to the ActiveReload guys for making a great product.

1. Update

With the launch of our new [issue tracker](https://github.com/blog/411-github-issue-tracker), our trackers on Lighthouse have been retired. Thanks for the great run!

To report a bug or submit a feature request, please [contact support](https://github.com/contact).

topfunky has an excellent post on using gestures to control Git.

From the article:

Swipe up to git push
Swipe down to git pull
Swipe left to see git status

As the launch draws near I thought I’d share some awesome things people have been saying about the GH.

What’s amazing about Github is how it really brings the social aspect into play. Chris and Tom are showing us all visually how git development is supposed to work. I know I personally had some bing moments once I started pulling in commits from external git repos.

- Rick Olson

You’ve probably heard this at least twelve times in the last week, but github is totally badass. I’ve never had a reason to put my code up on a hosting service like that before, but now I do.

- Josh Susser

If you don’t know about git and github yet, it’s time you clean up your RSS feeds and find some good source of information.

- Matt Aimonetti

Chris and Tom are totally onto something with GitHub. It’s the perfect glue for the existing social network of open source developers.

- Jesse Newland

[GitHub] marks a turning point for me in my opensource contribution. The barrier to entry for pushing patches is so low that I expect to see myself cloning a bunch more repos and making my teeny tiny fixes.

- Kamal Fariz

All in all, it’s a great service – the way SourceForge should have been.

- Emmanuele Bassi

A quick stroll through Twitter confirms it: you will thank yourself for signing up at GitHub.

rtomayko says GitHub is ‘Myspace for Hackers’ over on his blog. Flattering, yes, but read closely: this dude gets it.

From his post:

“Pull requests” happen every day over email without GitHub but, by sucking those interactions into a web application and recording certain bits and pieces as they transact, GitHub is able to 1.) guide git newbies in using fairly advanced concepts, and 2.) record that the interactions took place, which makes it possible to build entirely new types of tools.

Guilty as charged.

The first repository in the production db was created October 29th. The first private beta repository was created January 12th. The 1,000th repository was created today, Feburary 25th. (And yeah, that’s not counting deleted repositories.)

Sound slow? Consider this: 400 of those repositories were created in the last week.

That’s all for now. See you at 10,000.