On Kiln and GitHub

I work for Fog Creek Software and help maintain the infrastructure underlying FogBugz On Demand and Kiln.

Eyebrows sometimes raise when those in the know discover that I am publishing small amounts of code to GitHub. My imagination hears whispers of treason, and the outcome is this short article.

In my line of work one can either be irrationally loyal to a given tool, or one can choose the weapon that best suits the environment to be conquered. If I was going to be working with a group of developers on a serious project, I would go with Kiln. Mercurial is easy to use and works perfectly across all major platforms. Kiln emphasizes its best features and gives you a fantastic code review tool as well as integration into one of the best bug tracking platforms available.

However, for one who wishes to publish code for the sake of sharing with the world, GitHub is the obvious choice. While I think Git is an all around pain in the butt when compared to Mercurial, it is clear that the open source community has chosen its platform. Kiln is not built to do this sort of thing, and Bitbucket does not have the traction. When I’m looking for code, I more often than not end up on GitHub.

In a perfect world I could do all of my development with Kiln tools and then easily push my open source projects to GitHub as appropriate. Someday, maybe. For now, I use different tools as needed.