← Back to context

Comment by gkya

8 years ago

I don't understand why a solo dev needs to host his private repos somewhere. You can just keep it on your machine, and have it backed up with the rest of your data. And given git is distributed, you should be able to work with teams w/o requiring Github.

It's a convenience thing for me. As a hobbyist solo dev it'd be nice to have a place to work on code across different devices in private and then open it up when I feel the code is mature enough and the time is right to put it out there under an open source license.

Right now I use VSTS for private repos, but it'd be nice to be on GitHub were the vast majority of open source projects are hosted.

This completely misses the forest for the trees.

I currently pay for GitHub, personally. This has the following benefits:

- Easy to collaborate with other people if I want to invite them to my projects.

- Web-based code hosting, meaning I can access my code from anywhere regardless of whether I have access to my own machine or not.

- A web interface! This is quite useful for browsing code or sharing particular snippets with others.

- Integration with third-party tools. Almost literally every code-related service that offers integration will integrate with GitHub – things like CI servers etc. for example. This means basically zero-effort setup for many other tools.

The cost to me is basically a rounding error, and the utility is great.

I can only speak for myself, but I like hosting private repos on GitHub because I like using issues & milestones to track my progress