GitHub Gists

I finally took a few minutes to learn what gists are in GitHub. I understood the basic idea from encountering them all over the web, but I wanted to precisely know what they are.

Here are some essential aspects of gists, as I understand them:

• each gist is a repository, with all that implies:
  • can be versioned and diff’ed
  • can be forked or cloned
• a gist can be public or secret
  • secret doesn’t mean private; it means not searchable
  • however, its URL is discoverable and shareable
• a gist can contain anything text-based, such as:
  • source code
  • Markdown and plain text
  • JSON, XML, and CSV data
  • Jupyter Notebooks
  • GeoJSON files (maps!)
• more info: About gists

My recent motivation for learning to use gists was to embed sample code on this blog, like this:

Pretty convenient and simple!