GitHub gists are broken.
When a user creates a gist on GitHub, they are prompted to choose to make their gist a secret. While most people think that a secret gist is identical to a private repo, the reality is that it’s not. Anyone on the internet can access your “secret gist” if they have the URL. Put simply, secret gists are unlisted on your profile and can only be accessible by you and others who have the URL to the gist. Users have been raising complaints about the "secret" gist functionalities on GitHub forums.
Now think about this scenario, you’re a Software Engineer in a biigggg tech company and you share an important gist containing some important script with a colleague. Now we all know the retention rate in the tech industry. A couple of months later, your colleague leaves the company but still has access to all the proprietary gists. He/she may knowingly or unknowingly use code from that snippet in their future workplace. This is not good. We are here to do good. Which is why we created GistHub.
GistHub solves for the lack of "private" gists on GitHub and adds additional features in order to make creating and sharing gists a lucrative experience.
GistHub allows users to create Public or Private gists. None of that secret stuff here sir.
Beyond solving the core problem where a user can access a gist only after a permission is granted, we have added additional features to like
- Permissions management
- Jupyter Notebook-like interface for creating gists (unlimited title, code and text blocks)
- Syntax highlighting support for common languages in code blocks
- A copy button to easily copy the gist
- Ability to edit gists after creating them
- Frontend: React.js, Material UI
- Backend: Node, Koa
- Deployment: Github Vercel, Heroku
- Tools: Git
Our project is guided by the problems observed in forums and communities. Here are a few of the resources that were helpful to us —
- https://github.blog/2014-05-09-change-the-visibility-of-your-gists/
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3673306
- https://gist.github.com/zmwangx/bc79e7d95d82c2f5e0976975b6e1c6d6s
- https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/editing-and-sharing-content-with-gists/creating-gists This is an extension of the project started here.
