Online Code Repositories

I’ve actually used a lot of code repositories, but a lot of the ones I used in the past have fallen out of favour. Kids these days don’t know how good they have it with their search engines, their online documentation, their help forums, social media, integrated development environments, and open source projects. When I learned to code you had a book and a text editor. Just having a mouse and syntax highlighting was considered a luxury. Now I think a lot of ‘coding’ is web searches plus cutting and pasting.

Get GitHub?

I never set out to write as much PHP as I have, but now that I have many many lines of PHP some of them deserve a better home than a tarball on Muschamp.ca. I’ve shared code using pastebin before and there seem to be no shortage of other code snippet repositories, but the one tool everyone seems to use that I’ve never tried is GitHub.  When I worked as a software developer full time we used StarTeam and on at least one project CVS which didn’t have all the pretty GUI front ends it has now. The other source control system I have experience with is SubVersion which is is what WordPress uses for plugins. I paid the piper for a Mac OS X GUI client. Alas I never used anything other than BBEdit to write PHP.

Using GitHub

Now I’ll see how easy it is to check the current versions of my various mashup and media collection PHP code into GitHub. Apparently I already have a GitHub account, I just have never created my own repository before. It doesn’t seem to have worked completely. I didn’t have that much code, but I did check in two additional open source PHP code projects that I used which the original creator does not want to maintain anymore so I’ve made my necessary fixes and additions available to anyone who wants to use my web mashup code.

Alas it doesn’t seem to have successfully created a repository. It seems to have hung or stalled. I did get an email saying a new public key had been added to my account. But there doesn’t appear to be any repositories under my name on GitHub.com. Any GitHub experts who can tell me what I need to do to get my code into a public repository? The Mac client seems to have failed to create a repository and check in my code… I followed the official instructions.

My code is now in GitHub

It took several days, several emails to support, and using the command line, but my code seems to be in GitHub. There are several line break issues. I use BBEdit, I can change the line break type I use, or try and correct them individually by hand or in one big go using a built in tool. I should also look up the JavaDoc type syntax as I think I’ve gotten it wrong in places.

This code is long overdue for an update. APIs keep changing and I’ve been way too busy with the CFA® Program but now that I’ve finally passed all three exams I am programming again but in Python of late as it is now the third most popular programming language. I’ve yet to check any Python into GitHub though. If you have thoughts on GitHub especially since it was bought by Microsoft you can leave them below.

This entry was originaly posted on October 21st, 2012, it was last edited on May 17th, 2019 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: CVS, GitHub, StarTeam, SubVersion.