Daniel Insley
If you are working on a program or web related script and are stuck online code repositories such as GitHub is a great way to get collaborators in on your project working with you. If you are a developer you already know the power of having others review your code and make suggestions. When you are in the thick of creating things sometimes the most obvious and quickest answer eludes you but someone else less involved would pick up on it right away.
Not only is it a great solution for debugging problems it is the perfect way to collaborate programming teams together. When you have multiple people coding a program it is imperative that you have version and revision controls and multiple people are not all making changes to different versions of the code. Online code repositories such as GitHub allow you to do just that.
Services like this also allows you to set developer permission which allows you to control what parts of the code what developers have access to. So if you only want to share a small snippet with the world or with someone on your team that is all you have to share.
Another key benefit to using one of these online repository services is that you have a true account of what changes were made, why they were made and who made them. Having these types of records during a development project is crucial to keeping on track and on budget. These systems can also track developer time which makes billing easy.
GitHub also offers application hosting that is reliable, secure and gets backed up often. This type of hosting is built for your applications and offers several interfaces including a command line client and a full scale graphical application to interact with your server.
Most code repositories also have forums and communities built around them. This allows you access to a huge group of talented developers to collaborate and network with. You can also learn a lot by reading the forums and blogs of online code repositories as you know with programming and web development there is always something new to learn and these are great communities to do that in.
Some code repositories are free and others are paid. Almost all of them offer a free option if you are working on an open source project and are releasing the code to the public.
Online code repositories are also a great place to find open source code you need to create your projects. There are millions of scripts available in almost every scripting language much of which is open source. So if you take a little time to do some research there is a good likely hood someone has already solved your problem and posted the code for all to share.
Before you decide on an online repository do your research and make sure your code is going to be available by checking the companies up time ratings and reading customer reviews.