git

I had to apply an exam this week for a web development for beginners course I'm teaching. We're using ruby for the server side for a couple of reasons: heroku is an excellent option for one's first deployments and I wanted to get a better grip on Ruby on rails 3 and html5 for my own improvement (and I've found that there's no better way to learn stuff the good way than teaching them).

No decent developer can survive without some sort of source control management. The one I know more of is git and I'm a huge fan of github. We're actually using github organizations to manage the class projects (the github staff is really great, they've let me use private repositories for the student groups at no extra charge).

So, git, I assume you're familiar with it -if not, take a look at this and this - . Those of you familiar with it may also be familiar with Github, the awesome git hosting service. And those of you who may have used github long enough, are thankful for being able to rest assured that your code will be on a reliable server and never, ever, get lost, even if you computer catches fire and then is stole by ghosts.

But, what happens when the unicorn strikes? Those very rare moments when something happens and github is down. With your code. Presumably when you most need to push or pull changes. That stuff happens, it's the law of nature, and not even a super rad site like github is exempt from some downtime, you know that. But what about your code?

I came up with some kind of solution for my projects, and no, it's not to store it in a usb every five seconds or having a magical RAID, it's just probability: for my really important projects, you can simply create backup repositories in other git hosting websites!

I usually have two options beside github: Codaset and Gitorious. And both have their advantages and disadvantages: