At Techorama, some sessions really sprung out. I took some notes and pictures (tip for the Windows Phoners: Office Lens) so I could share what I learnt.

Nik Molnar gave a great session on extending GitHub (see his slides on GitHub). He showed some of the great tools that add functionality to GitHub. If you don’t already have a GitHub account or work with Git, I cannot over-recommend getting started with it.

Here are some things he shared, though very incomplete. Be sure to check out the rest or, even better, attend one of his talks if you can.

Printing

Gitprint is a simple idea that could be of great use. Go to a markdown file on GitHub and change the ‘hub’ in the url to ‘print’. Presto! A printable PDF version of the file. You can also do this from the repository root and Gitprint will take the README.MD file.

Markdown

Speaking of Markdown. If you haven’t already learned it, do so right away. It’s increasingly the markup language of developers collaborating.
A handy tool for Markdown is MarkdownPad. It allows you to see the results on the fly and it offers a choice of the different Markdown flavors.
Something I learnt about Markdown is that apart from the usual readme.md file, GitHub also recognizes a contributing.md file. The readme file will be displayed in your repository root, but the contributing file will be shown to anyone that wants to create an issue. An example of such a file can be found in the Angular repository. Notice the link on the ‘guidelines for contributing’ when you want to create an issue.
And finally, if you’re into Markdown and mindmapping, check out Memofon.com.

HuBoard

HuBoard is a task board that lists the issues of a GitHub repository and syncs between GitHub and HuBoard. When you drag a task to the done column, the issue is closed. Quite neat.

5 minute fork

5minfork.com is similar to gitprint.com. If your repository has an index.html file in the root, replace https://github.com/ with http://5minfork.com (lose the -s in the protocol) and a fork will be created and hosted. For example, https://github.com/petermorlion/pwa has an index.html. Go to http://5minfork.com/petermorlion/pwa to see it live. Of course, this is a simple example. But for more complex applications, this could be handy to see how it works when not on your local machine (think Angular, Durandal, etc).

etc etc etc

There was lots more: Emoji Cheat Sheet, Expandinizr, userscripts.org, Octokit, asciiflow, Web Sequence Diagrams, and more. Once again, check out the session in its entirety.