Welcome to the third edition of The GitHub Reflog — the weekly chronicle of remarkable GitHub repos and community activity. For previous editions, check out The Reflog Archive.

Community Update

Last week, Apple’s MacRuby project began to officially migrate to GitHub for its development. This week, the Eclipse Foundation and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler both created official GitHub mirrors. ghc even accepts pull requests!

Welcome, guys!

divegeek/uscode

This small project from Shawn Willden is simple, but ambitious. It is a repository that contains a complete, up-to-date version of the United States Code, in the most hacker-friendly format possible: version-controlled plaintext. The repo is updated regularly with official modifications from the US Federal Government websites. Curious to see what modifications were made? Run git diff.

The purpose of this repo is explore new ideas related to the legislation process in the digital age. Check out the readme to learn more.

Awesome Repo of the Week

scoates/owty

Sean Coates found a novel use for GitHub this week: comparing beer recipes.

He’s using the new image compare views to showcase the difference a little yeast makes in his homebrewed cream ale.

MERGE

Cheers! ✨ 🍺 ✨

Remarkable Repos

  • dotcloud/cloudlets:
    This project is awesome. It’s a tool for creating small, universal server images under version control. The resulting images can be exported to “any bootable format known to man” for deployment in virtually any environment. Formats include: Xen, KVM, EC2 AMI, Tarballs, and ol’ fashioned bootable CDs. Soon, cloudlets will offer support for full VM generation (vmkdk, xen, and qemu) and multi-image stacks. If you’re looking to create turn-key server images for your application or platform, this is a great place to start.
  • josevalim/elixir:
    This is a functional language runtime built on top of Erlang. It provides object orientation, a Ruby-esque syntax, and can interoperate seamlessly with standard Erlang code and datatypes. The project is still under development, but already has a large contributor and user base. If you’d like to assist in its development, checkout the project roadmap and send a pull request.
  • ilektrojohn/creepy:
    Ever wonder what personal data is floating around the web for the world to see? Checkout creepy. Point it to all of your social network accounts, and it displays a map filled with your past locations. Data is fetched from a number of social APIs and photo services. It even goes as far as to parse Geo-location tags from uploaded image EXIF data. Creepy!
  • jordansissel/fpm:
    This is an interesting project. FPM, “Effing Package Management”, takes out all the headaches of creating .deb and .rpm packages for your own consumption. It allows you to distribute your application in any style and configuration you want, abandoning all distro-specific best practices. The author designed it to be as simple as possible: “Here’s my install dir and here are some dependencies; please make a package”. This may or may not be a good idea. Give it a try and decide for yourself 🙂

Promising Repos

  • javisantana/whitebrd.me:
    This brand new project looks very promising. It’s a webapp that provides realtime collaborative sketching. It’s essentially Etherpad but for simple drawings. To try it out, open up The Official GitHub Reflog Whiteboard™ and start sketching!
  • atomicobject/objection:
    This is an MIT licensed dependency injection framework for iOS and OSX ObjectiveC applications. It strives to be as lightweight, yet flexible, as possible. The project is still fairly young and has a small todo list, so forks are encouraged.
  • mikeal/spider:
    This node.js project is a simple programmatic web spider, powered by jQuery. It has a very small code base (~200 SLOC), yet offers custom user agent strings, connection pools, and memory cache.

Feedback is appreciated! Send any questions, suggestions, and anonymous tips to reflog@kennethreitz.com.

For more open source news, check out The Changelog and github.com/explore.