the corner office : tech blog

I have a Github account, but there's (currently) nothing there. Mainly because I'm too lazy to clean up and review and publish code I don't mind being public.

I also have a BitBucket account, and there's (currently) nothing public there either. Mainly for the same reason that I don't have anything public at Github.

The difference being that I've recently started pushing private code to Bitbucket, because unlike Github, Bitbucket allows private repos for free.

Then today I came across GitLab. Now I have an account there too. It too allows private repos.

I'm a little old-skool and I'm still making peace with the idea of having my 'private' coded hosted externally. I mean, I still pre-encrypt my stuff before letting cloud backups do their own encrypting and syncing. But in reality, my 'private' code is stuff like Project Euler, and apps I use at home, which are generally a bit ugly or hard-coded for me. I don't want them shared by default but it's not the end of the world if they got 'leaked' in future. The main thing I gain is easy backing up of my code. Which I sort of have anyway with my encrypty-cloud backup, but restoring and accessing that isn't so easy.

The two other reasons for remote hosting are visibility (aka helping the world, and/or ego), and code management features.

As for 'visibility' - I think Github's still the only place to publish code, should you want your work to be seen. I'll get around to publishing stuff publically by default, eventually, since ... well, why not? Yet none of the pet projects I'm working on are likely to be of interest to anyone else in the world, and since I don't think anything I work on at home is necessarily CV-enhancing (beyond 'does he write crap code?'), I'm not that fussed about visibility.

Finally, code management features. Community features (patches, merges, etc) in Github are great, but I don't need them for private code. I'm curious to see what Bitbucket (and, probably, Gitlab) will give me. Issue tracking and the like? Code searching? CI (Gitlab, I think?). It'll be interesting to see what's useful and/or interesting.