RailsConf08: 23 Hacks

Nathaniel Talbott (from Terralien) gave a great talk on a number of interesting hacks in ruby. There was one in particular that I want to focus on here: gitjour. Gitjour is a fun and novel app that will discover git repositories on a local network via Bonjour. It’s hardly going to change your life, but it is fantastic for ad-hoc sharing of code on a local network and quick collaboration without too much ceremony, e.g. at a conference, or ruby users group, etc.

It’s a fun tool and you should definitely try it out.

$ gem install gitjour
$ gitjour list
$ gitjour clone whatever_app

While I’m on the topic of git, I’d like to point out that the community at RailsConf was completely sold on using git and using GitHub in particular. Even though I am a git-switcher myself, it was really surprising to see that almost the whole community had either switched or was planning on switching.

GitHub did a great job marketing at the conference. They gave out free t-shirts that said “Fork You” on the front. On the back the shirt said “http://github.com/________” and you were expected to take a sharpee and write your GitHub user name so that others could see your projects (my projects are here). The successful result was that at nearly every session or meal someone would use the phrase “I think I’ll put this code up on GitHub”.

UPDATE: I’ve found a picture of the shirt here