Github

By Michael Altfield, on October 2nd, 2011

With each passing day, it’s becoming more and more obvious that Internet users are transitioning to cloud-based storage. Between (1) My home workstation running Arch Linux, (2) my laptop dual-booting in Ubuntu Linux and Windows 7, (3) my netbook running eeebuntu, and (4), public-access PCs at my University, I need a way to open the latest version of our files from any geographic location on any OS.

A few years ago I built a multi-TB storage solution which hosted my personal, online Subversion repository. But power is expensive, so this box ended up getting turned off. In response, I fell into the bad habit of storing my source code merely as files on the cloud without version control.

Several years ago (assuming your file was small enough) this meant emailing an attachment. Or, more recently, uploading it to Google Docs. Then people started using DropBox. Finally, if you cared about the privacy of your data, you moved to Wuala.

But Wuala tends to corrupt my files as I’m editing them in gvim, so I started storing my files locally again–which rocked the boat and convinced me to finally get around to learning git. Git has always been on my to-try list, and I recently found out that Google is switching their code repo from Perforce to Git, so I figured I’d give it a try.

Setting up an account in github was super easy. It literally gave you the commands to copy & paste into your terminal (pre-built with your user-specific info). My first project: a socket for my networking class found here.