Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Monday, 21st October 2013

What are the differences between “forking,” “cloning,” and downloading the project as a zip file on GitHub?

“fork” creates a copy of the project hosted on your own GitHub account. This is an exclusive Build software better, together. (links to: http://Github.com) feature and not a Git feature.

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For a Django application, deployed on Heroku, what are my options for storing user-uploaded media files?

S3 is really a no-brainer for this, it’s extremely inexpensive, very easy to integrate with and unbelievably reliable. It’s so cheap that it will be practically free for testing purposes (expect to spend pennies a month on it).

[... 88 words]

Does GitHub hire developer advocates? If so, how do you go about applying to be one?

If you’re a good candidate for a developer advocate position, you already know how to get in touch with the right people at GitHub!

[... 81 words]

Is GitHub a reliable tool if I want to upload all the non-proprietary scientific computing code I have from my hard drive?

Yes. I find GitHub is a particularly good place to host older code that you might not intend to actively maintain, as it makes it extremely easy for other people to pick up where you left off.

[... 65 words]

What are prominent examples for remote work besides 37Signals, Github and Automattic?

Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) have a very impressive distributed team culture.

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