Recently I’ve started using a couple of GitHub-related sites for collaboration. These are made possible by GitHub’s open API, and demonstrate how shipping an API allows a community to develop around your product, which in turn makes it more difficult for a competitor to displace your users. I’m sure there are many other sites out there, but the two I’m using at the moment are Huboard and Gitter.im.

Huboard

Huboard is basically a card wall or kanban board for GitHub issues and pull requests. It seems not to work well with IE at the moment – I recommend using Chrome to view it. I’m a huge Trello user and fan, but Huboard is nice because it eliminates the need to manage membership and permissions to Trello boards related to GitHub projects. You can just keep everything in GitHub. With ASP.NET being developed in the open on GitHub, you can find a lot of activity in the various projects under the aspnet GitHub account on Huboard.

With Huboard, you can drag and drop to prioritize issues in the backlog, as well as drag and drop the status. You can mark issues as ready to pull, too, so you can follow a proper kanban pull-style approach, in order to maximize throughput and responsiveness. I’ve only been using it for one project and for a short while, but so far I’m a fan.

Gitter.im

I’ve been using Gitter.im for less time than I’ve been using Huboard, but I love that it leverages the GitHub API (after I grant it permission to access my account) to show me rooms, organizations, and projects that interest me. And again, because the only requirement is GitHub, it beats out other chat programs because there’s no need to separately manage access.

Other GitHub-Integrated Tools

What other GitHub-integrated tools do you use? I’m curious to learn about more of them, and how you like them. Leave a link in the comments and share your experience.