What Is the Gist? Understanding the Use of Public Gists on GitHub

GitHub is a popular source code hosting site which serves as a collaborative coding platform. The many features of GitHub have greatly facilitated developers\´ collaboration, communication, and coordination. Gists are one feature of GitHub, which defines them as "a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others." This three-part study explores how users are using Gists. The first part is a quantitative analysis of Gist metadata and contents. The second part investigates the information contained in a Gist: We sampled 750k users and their Gists (totalling 762k Gists), then manually categorized the contents of 398. The third part of the study investigates what users are saying Gists are for by reading the contents of web pages and twitter feeds. The results indicate that Gists are used by a small portion of GitHub users, and those that use them typically only have a few. We found that Gists are usually small and composed of a single file. However, Gists serve a wide variety of uses, from saving snippets of code, to creating reusable components for web pages.