The amount of people running into issues with our gem builder has been overwhelming, so we’re releasing the code if some kind souls want to lend a hand making the system more secure and robust.

https://github.com/pjhyett/github-gem-builder/tree/master

Okay this is just amazing. Nick Quaranto has blessed us with an Oct-O-Lantern.

To see the making of, start with this photo and keep clicking ‘next.’

Nick, you rock!

You can now create Gists automatically with Ubiquity by using the ‘share’ button in the Command Editor.

The team behind Insoshi has written a guide to Setting up your Git repositories for open source projects at GitHub. Check it out for a comprehensive guide to being both a project creator and contributor.

Basically, the less effort that’s required to bring in code via a pull request, the sooner it can be added to the project release. And at the end of the day, that’s really what it’s all about.

I’ve converted our participation graphs (as seen above) to use Canvas instead of Flash. Linux users rejoice! This means the graphs should load quite a bit faster and not bog down your CPU like the Flash graphs did. I haven’t yet implemented the little mouse over bubbles that the old graphs had, but I plan to do that in the future.

You might also be interested to know that I’ve used my Open Source Friday project to implement these graphs. The project is called Primer and offers a Flash-like layer on top of Canvas that makes it easier to create dynamic and interactive Canvas-based works. It’s still very young, but I’ll be working on it every Friday and hope to get it to the point where I can redo the impact graphs with it. Enjoy!

The secret is out! Today Google released the entire Android stack as open source software and guess what version control system they are using? That’s right, it’s Git.

I say ‘the secret is out’, because we happened to know about this a bit beforehand, since I’ve been down to the Google campus a number of times in the last few weeks helping to train the Androids there in Git. I was asked by Shawn Pearce (you may know him from his Git and EGit/JGit glory – he is the hero that takes over maintanance when Junio is out of town) to come in to help him train the Google engineers working on Android in transitioning from Perforce to Git, so Android could be shared with the masses. I can tell you I was more than happy to do it.

I gave two talks for the Android team, working with Dave Bort (the handsome guy you see in the video on the front page here) and Shawn to develop material that will help them specifically in transitioning from Perforce and highlighting the tasks that they felt would be most common with thier workflow and project size.

Logical Awesome is now officially offering this type of custom training service to all companies, where we can help your organization with training and planning if you are thinking about switching to Git as well. If you would be interested, send me an email at scott@logicalawesome.com.

If you’re interested, the tech talks that I gave there should be available on YouTube once Google finishes post-producing them. We’ll be sure to remind everyone when that happens. :)

It’s hard to imagine, but just one year ago today we made the first commit to the GitHub repository. We don’t have a baby book for GitHub, so we’ll have to settle on the blog to record our handprint and first words.

We have four full-time employees: Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Scott Chacon. Our support man, Tekkub, answers all your nuanced questions via email, IRC, and on the forums. We’ve taken a grand total of $0 in venture capital or other outside investment. Just recently we topped 20,000 public repositories.

But we couldn’t have done it without you, our loyal users. You’ve dared to try a new version control system and seen how much better things can be. Thanks for joining us on this adventure, we look forward to the upcoming year to make your life as a developer even more amazing!

The 2008 Rails Rumble is set to start tonight at midnight and we’ll be sponsoring the competition in two ways. First, we’re providing free private repositories for each of the 237 teams. Second, we’ve thrown in a bottle of the traditional GitHub celebratory Bourbon, Pappy Van Winkle, for the winner!

Keep up with the event over at the Rails Rumble Blog. There’s sure to be some really great apps come out of it. We can’t wait to see them!

Economies around the world have hit a serious rough patch, and some folks may be looking for work elsewhere. What better way to impress your new employer than to include a link to your GitHub profile so they can check out your skills?

From personal experience, it’s much easier to hire someone that has made their code publicly available, as opposed to just taking their word that they’re good at what they do.

Don’t have any open source projects of your own? Find one to contribute to!

It’s been almost 6 months since we released the network graph and since then it has become an indispensable part of the GitHub experience. Over that period I’ve been compiling a list of things that would make the graph even better. More precise and less confusing portrayal of merge and branch structure. The ability to pull a specific range of commits in for drawing, resulting in blazingly fast incremental renders. Data caching so to remove the overhead of just-in-time graph construction. A boatload of bug fixes. And finally, the ability to actually draw the Rails, Linux, and Git networks!

What are you waiting for? Go check out the new and improved graph of your favorite project!

Here’s our latest feature:

Did ya spot it? It’s the delete button!

No, we’re not crazy. Prior to today, if you had a project that had been forked, you were unable to delete it.

The reason is simple: when you fork a repository, we don’t copy over the data, we just point your repository to the original via an alternates file. It’s one of the great things about git, and the reason you can fork the linux kernel and not use up any of your allotted space (until you make changes).

So, if the owner of the repository wants to delete their repo, it would have broken all of the forks as well. Not exactly optimal in open source situations when the original project maintainer gets bored.

Our solution was to create a “graveyard” for deleted repositories. A place where your repo’s objects are stored, but no longer associated with your account. That way it’s not counted against your account’s limits nor are any of its forks affected.

One thing worth noting is that this does not apply to private repositories with forks. If a private repo is deleted, all of its forks will also be deleted for security reasons. It’s up to you to let your network and collaborators know what’s happening.

With awesome tools like GitNub and GitX adding GitHub integration, it would be great if you didn’t have to keep re-entering you username and API token.

So let’s settle on a standard, pioneered by GitNub:

$ git config --global github.user defunkt
$ git config --global github.token 6ef8395fecf207165f1a82178ae1b984

(Remember to replace defunkt and 6ef8395fecf207165f1a82178ae1b984 with your own username and token.)

Applications and scripts can easily access this information:

$ git config --global github.user
defunkt

You can also access ~/.gitconfig directly.

I just pushed out new versions of my gist script and the gist.el mode which use this method. Check the code for examples in Ruby and Emacs Lisp.

If you’re a developer, please adopt this method of storing GitHub data. Your users will thank you!

Scott Chacon is now officially a GitHubber. Read his blog post about it.

From running git-scm.com to writing the Git Peepcode to creating GitCasts to all his open source projects, Scott is pretty much unstoppable.

We’re happy to have him on board and will continue to use his Git expertise for good.

technoweenie and kneath teamed up to create the Calendar About Nothing. Visually track your open source contributions over time. Try not to break your streak!

Just PM calendaraboutnothing on GitHub and your calendar will be setup.

Oh yeah, it’s open source, too. Awesome!

James Smith wants you to know if your gem has built yet.

https://hasmygembuiltyet.org

It’s open source, too. Thanks James!

Are you a Prototype coder? If so, you might want your code pimped by the guys behind the framework.

The idea:

I’m an avid reader of the blog of Wil Shipley, a man in the business of writing great apps for OS X. His running code improvment series, Pimp My Code, takes submissions from readers who think their code needs refactoring. Then Shipley refactors them, explaining the whys and hows along the way. The submissions are small (never more than 75-100 lines), but in rewriting them Shipley always happens upon specific, useful programming tips. I don’t know the first thing about Objective-C, but I find the series fascinating and instructive.

So we’re going to do something similar on this blog. Do you have a piece of JavaScript you want refactored? Does it use Prototype?

Check out the article for more information.

It’s true, GitHub goes down. But this is not centralized version control land – GitHub going down does not have to stop you from committing to or deploying your code in a bind.

Our Disaster Guide that outlines some of the ways you can share and utilize your Git repository if something happens to GitHub.

I’ve posted a mirror of the Diaster Guide over at my personal blog: When GitHub Goes Down. This is a static page on a separate server that won’t go down if GitHub is having problems.

(Note that we always recommend pushing to a second remote – GitHub is just a node in the graph. The more nodes, the merrier. If you need help setting up an authenticated SSH server, feel free to ask the list.)

Last week’s Git Down was great. Thanks to all who came out, and sorry to all who missed it.

I’ve posted a few pictures on my Flickr account.

The Code Search feature will be taking a brief vacation as we try to iron out some kinks with it.

If you swing by you may possibly learn about any of the following:

• code_swarm
• git-sh
• magit
• GitHub on the iPhone

You will definitely get some free beer and a chance to meet with other Git and GitHub users, though.

See you tomorrow!

Update: Typo!

We’ve just added site-wide token based authentication. You can find your API token in your account page, front and center.

Simply pass login and token to any URL which requires authentication.

For example:

We’ll be enhancing the API soon, but in the meantime you can use this to more easily build tools and automation around GitHub. Enjoy.

Flickr set.

Russell Mull discusses his experience hacking on Cappuccino:

While playing with cappuccino, I thought I’d fix a few bugs. So I made a github account and cloned the full repo. The clone took about a half second. Really. The collaboration model on github just decimates all the commercial systems I’ve used, not to mention cvs and svn. This is what sourceforge always should have been.

Amen.

Okay no, they’re not here yet. But the amazing PostgreSQL has a git mirror which can only mean one thing – they need to move to GitHub.

Are you a PostgreSQL developer? Know someone who is? Let them know how awesome GitHub is for open source.

rictic will be showing off his code_swarm fork, which you may have seen in this video.

We still need more speakers – if you’ve got anything interesting and Git related, let me know so we can add you to the list!

Update: rtomayko will be speaking about git-sh – what are you speaking about?

David Baldwin has said goodbye to WordPress and started using GitHub as his blog. Go see for yourself:

github.com/bilson/blog

I love seeing novel uses of git and GitHub and this one especially caught my interest. Having all your blog posts in one versioned repository with all images and code readily available is a cool idea.

I have a habit of changing my blog URL and software a lot and I’ve lost a great many posts over the years. I’m starting to wonder if a few tweaks and features would make this work even better. What about a blog system that uses GitHub for data storage so that you always know where your data is and that you can take it with you? Or a blog system that sucked in content from a GitHub repo and formatted it nicely so that you could post by simply pushing to a GitHub repo? What other ideas are there that could use GitHub and blogging together?

Join us for the first ever Git Down on Tuesday, September 30th at 7:30pm. Mingle with other Git and GitHub addicts while you drink free beer. Listen to the world famous Scott Chacon present about… something Git related. Take home a t-shirt.

Presentations will be short and sweet. Got something Git related you can show off for 10 minutes? Email chris@logicalawesome.com and we’ll pencil you in.

Special thanks to Serious Business for hosting this first Git Down. See you there!