GitHub

Github is world renown, it's been making my life easier for years. We mainly use with colleagues or friends to work on game development projects, and it's easy to use even for non-coders since they include a Windows and MacOS GUI out of the box, and it's compatible with any git manager out there. They recently added the ability to have free private repositories, which are great.

The fork and pull request process designed to propose changes on third party repositories seems a bit troublesome to me in particular, but I understand why they did it, and I just got used to it.

Github is the most famous git services available online - I personally don't know any developers who don't use Github. This in turn makes Github essential to any developers as many people share codes and stuff through Github.

I don't know exactly why but developers nowadays seem to prefer to just put their work in Github. Thus GitHub hosts almost all kind of open source projects which I love to fork and play around with. I personally think it is very productive. It has a good and intuitive User Interface which makes viewing information and reading code easier.

I also feel Github is stable than other alternatives available.

I don't think there is much to dislike about Github but I think it isn't very easy to use for a beginner. I spent a long time learning about Git commands and stuff. Other than this, I can't think of any cons.

I work as a software engineer for a large consulting company, but as a side job, I teach a programming class. I use GitHub to share with my students all of the sample code and slides that we work on during our classes.

To me, one of the most important features is being able to work on my projects on multiple devices, than span across different operating systems. I have a two laptops (one of which is a Mac!) and a desktop computer. With GitHub, I can quickly sync my code and documents between devices and seamlessly pick up were I left off.

If I ever make a mistake and need to go back to previous versions of my slides or code, I can quickly restore them with the excellent versioning features.

For my students, it is very freeing knowing that every project or problem that we solve during class will be immediately available to them right after class. I helps them concentrate on learning and understanding the programs instead of having to copy everything to their computers.

The initial learning curve is high... specially if you are new to code collaboration tools. Newcomers usually spend a long time learning the git commands, and how they can solve problems.

For newcomers, I would recommend the GitHub Desktop client (even if it is frowned upon by more experienced devs), to get a hang of how the branches, commits, push, pull and operations work.