GitHub Primer

If you're doing any kind of scientific computing and not using version control, you're doing it wrong. The git version control system and GitHub, a web-based service for hosting and collaborating on git-controlled projects, have both become wildly popular over the last few years.

Update June 18, 2009: The MX public repository has been moved to http://github.com/metamolecular/mx. Issue tracking is a critical feature for many software projects. Over the weekend I had a chance to play with a new GitHub feature - integrated issue tracking. A specific example from MX, the lightweight cheminformatics toolkit, illustrates the process. It was found that MX was throwing an exception where none should be thrown.

Our team’s work relies a lot on GitHub Actions. Besides the usual workflows to check our code for errors after each push 1 , we also have many workflows set up to run on a schedule.

Two years ago GitHub introduced the ability to sponsor an open source contributor – person or organization. They handle (and pay for) the payment logistics for a one-time or regular contribution. A blog post from June 2019 describes the thinking of the GiHub Sponsors team that went into this service, and the practicalities of using the service are documented here.