My Current GitHub Activity For The Morbidly Curious

This post started life as an email to Mark Ewald in response to a conversation I had with him and Ritesh Kothari following Mark's presentation to our user group last night (Gwinnett, Georgia, Microsoft User Group: GGMUG). He was asking if Ritesh or I had used GitHub. What follows is my response (warning, I am not an expert, just a happy user).

If you want to see what I've done on GitHub my account is http://github.com/jeffa00

The hurdle is really getting used to Git, not GitHub.

One thing I picked up on that other people were doing is putting their settings files for various tools on github. I use Vim a fair bit and it is really, really cool to be able to clone a repository from GitHub onto darn near any system and have all my settings and extensions show up. My Vim settings are found at https://github.com/jeffa00/dotvim.

One very important file when working with git is the .gitignore file. It tells git which files it should not add to a repository. For example the binaries that are produced when you compile many kinds of projects, or for Vim the temp files created while working on a file. I keep my personal global .gitignore file at https://github.com/jeffa00/MyGit.

I decided earlier this year to focus my personal projects on open source for a while, so I haven't bothered to set up a private repo on GitHub. If I decide to do something private, I'll just put that on my own server VM, not GitHub. That's one of the nice things with Git. All repos are equal from a technical perspective. If you decide that one of them is the “master” repo, then you just treat that one repo specially.

I have a few little projects I have done to various levels of incompleteness.

Pomodoro

This is a little Pomodoro time management timer written in JavaScript. It uses jQueryUI for some of the UI. I made this for my own use and just to have a little project to do in JavaScript.

Quirkety Export Node

Quirkety Export Node is a little Node.js app that uses Node as more or less a cross platform shell scripting language to convert a directory full of Json metadata and Markdown content into a static website. It uses the Mustache templating library among others. Not meant to be useful to anyone but me, hence the name Quirkety.

Posh Markdown

This is my first PowerShell commandlet. It takes an input containing Markdown text and outputs HTML. Hopefully useful in PowerShell scripts so that you can pipe in the inputs from a variety of sources and pipe out the output to wherever you need it.

Markdown Test File Generator

Not ambiguously named. It is a .Net commandline app to spit out as many Lorem Ipsum style Markdown documents to use for testing as you need. It contains some error messages of which I am particularly proud.