GitHub

What it is

GitHub is a hosting service for Git repositories, owned by Microsoft. Beyond storing code, it adds the tools teams work through: pull requests for proposing and reviewing changes, issues for tracking work, and Actions for running automated jobs. Repositories can be public or private, and reviewers can comment on individual lines of a change before it is merged.

It is also the largest home for open source software, which makes it the default place to share code, contribute to other projects and show work publicly. The gh command-line tool brings pull requests and issues into the terminal. It is also where many developers keep a public record of their work.

How I use it

• mervinc.com's code lives on GitHub.
• Changes to this site go through pull requests rather than straight to main.
• I work with it from the terminal with the GitHub CLI, next to the AI coding agents that use the same commands.
• Rental Pilot and Lend Pilot are hosted on AWS CodeCommit instead; the Git discipline is the same on both.

GitHub is the right tool when work benefits from pull requests, review and the wider open source world. I reach for it for this site because each change can be proposed, looked at and merged as a pull request, which keeps a clean history of what went live and why.

Questions