# GitHub



## Lucas Garron (Dec 23, 2011)

This comes out of my attempt to start keeping track of all the cube code floating around out there.

Anyhow, this is my call to action for using GitHub. GitHub is one of the most awesome services I know, and they have a very cute mascot:






The State of Things
There are a lot of cubers writing code (timers, applets, simulators, parsers, websites, and so on), and they've generally published their source code for others to improve. Nowadays, there's a website called GitHub where a lot of other programmers do open-source work like that. (Many important web projects use GitHub these days.)

The two main candidates for the next WCA scramblers, tnoodle and Mark 2, are being developed using GitHub, and GitHub makes it easy to see what we are up to. For example, here is a list of Mark 2's to-do list.

You!
In any case, I'd like to encourage any cubers who write code to create a GitHub account and participate. There already a few of us active there, including Jeremy, Clément, Shuang Chen, Shelley, Stachu, Tim, and Josef.
I've also set up an "organization" called cubing set up to be as a place that community projects can be collectively hosted.

How
At the most basic level, GitHub is a git server with a nice visual interface. You can think of git as as an easy way to make backups/snapshots of your source code, and GitHub as an easy way to publish them. However, git has a lot more features for keeping track of your code, and GitHub has a lot of great tools for working with other coders. GitHub has some very useful (but long) help pages to help you get set up.
(If you're on a Mac, I suggest using homebrew to install git and GitHub for Mac if you want an easy way to get started.)

I happen to think git is great for source control, and that GitHub is a really nice way to make your code available to others, but I understand everyone has their own way of developing code: qq would rather write personal projects and post them to his website on his own, and Walter Souza currently uses BitBucket for PPT (BitBucket also uses mercurial instead of git). But if you're serious about coding I suggest you at least look into source control.


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## joey (Dec 24, 2011)

I put https://bitbucket.org/captainjey/jjtimer on BitBucket. I prefer mercurial.

Demo at: http://telegraphics.com.au/~joey/jjtimer/jjtimer.html


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