Dear GitHub,
You provide a wonderful workspace where millions of people can share what they make, but there’s something you could do to make yourself even better. Could you please provide a way for us to create plug applications directly into your site the way Facebook does? Thousands of really cool software tools are just waiting to be discovered, from code analyzers to project history visualizers, and while your APIs already let them use your data on their own web sites, people would be much more likely to find them and use them if they were nested directly in projects’ GitHub pages. It wouldn’t be much of a technological challenge—given the way Facebook’s stock has been doing, you could probably even persuade one or two of their engineers to come and help build it—and it would kickstart the same healthy explosion of third-party tools we saw when Eclipse first came on the scene.
Thanks very much,
Us.
p.s. If you like this idea, please tweet the following:
Dear @github, please let us build plugins #githubplugins http://www.aosabook.org/blog/2012/09/dear-github/
While I like the idea of this, I personally prefer the current approach.
GitHub is in essence a very simple platform. Each project you work on has the same set of tools and once you get used to those tools, you can use them on each project.
Sure, analyzing data is cool, but like you said, there’s the API for that.
I think that if these plugins are implemented, the GitHub user base would become fractured.
I support to let developers build plugins in GitHub!