I think git is great, and I now use this git instead of subversion to version my research. Github is the natural place to host a git repository and so that’s what I’ve been doing with my latest research project. A lot of big Ruby projects use Lighthouse to track bugs, features requests, and things like this, so I thought I would try out how useful Lighthouse is for managing my bioinformatics research. So far I can say that it has been pretty handy, whenever I have an an idea or todo for my research I can log it as a ticket on my lighthouse page; like an online todo list for software development. I know that there are plenty of other systems such as Trac and Bugzilla, and I haven’t tried any of these, but for me Lighthouse is simple to use and does the job.
What’s also great is the integration between Github and Lighthouse where I mark up my Github commit messages to indicate that the patch I’m seding solves a particular ticket on Lighthouse. Github will understand this, and automatically send the update to Lighthouse for the corresponding ticket. When the ticket status is updated, a link is automatically added pointing back to the git commit for the patch. As and aside Github also integrates with twitter so my commit messages and a link to the patch are automatically sent to twitter, without me having to write a custom bash script.
I know this sort of setup won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I thought it worth mentioning that my experiences with these services so far has been positive.