GitHub: The Octocat is still going strong
August 04, 2017
GitHub: The Octocat is still going strong
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with GitHub
GitHub is considered by most to be the original online host of Git repositories and has become the service of choice on which to host your code for many developers. In my own business I use GitHub as a way to manage my project code, and it has been an excellent way to establish a portfolio of work to demonstrate my development skills. It is also the way I interact with the open source community as many open source projects, including React, Angular, Atom Text Editor and a ream of others, are hosted on GitHub. It solves the often challenging problem of version control for your development teams by allowing you to easily create and manage repositories, and to assign access level control to the repo such that only those that require it can merge, branch or approve pull requests.
- GitHub has an easy to use interface that allows you to create and customize the settings of your repositories in minutes. You can quickly push your code up to your new repo and assign team members to varying roles and access to perform different operations as required. This is important for reducing the time you have to spend on managing your teams.
- The documentation for the service is clearly and thoughtfully written with an eye for detail, and has terrific tutorials to help you progress from a novice to an advanced user.
- The service makes it easy to contribute to other projects and submit pull requests to get your code updates into the repository. This is important both for collaboration and for contributing to open source projects.
- It has an excellent search interface to locate repositories that you can review to learn and develop your technical skills and understanding of coding practices.
- Github offers free accounts to anyone and you can create as many repositories as you want. However, on the free plan all repositories are public; if you want to make your repo private (which may be necessary to protect your intellectual property), you will have to upgrade to a paid account. This business model may not be sustainable forever given that other services, like Atlassian Bitbucket, offer private repos on their paid accounts, and for many businesses this may be a more compelling and cost-saving option.
- The search feature, although powerful, can be a bit frustratingly limited at times, such as when you are looking for a specific expression within the code of a repository.
- Because it is based on Git, an often challenging toolset with a steep learning curve for command-line users, it can be daunting for some users to wrap their heads around the concepts of version control, although to be fair GitHub does offer decent GUI applications to make this easier.
- It can be a bit too easy at times to make a critical error that writes over an earlier change to your code which can be difficult and confusing to fix.
- Github has allowed me to focus on development and spend less time managing teams I'm collaborating with.
- It has given my business a solid footing on managing code versioning and making our open source code publicly available for review.
- It has created an environment where others can comment and offer fixes for bugs in our code, thus supporting the statement that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
GitHub holds up well against Gitlab and Bitbucket in terms of ease of use, documentation, support, and features for enterprise. However, it falls a bit flat on the pricing side with paid plans for private repos. It has been and remains the service of choice on which to post your code if you want it seen by the most people and is the place to be for open source projects.