GitHub is known for the great features it can offer programmers, but it's not only for them. There are plenty of other creative uses for GitHub. Here are nine different examples on what else GitHub can be used for.

What's GitHub?

GitHub is an online repository service that anyone can sign up for. It uses a technology called "Git" which keeps track of revisions and who made them. It also is a great way to share, clone (forking), and modify/enhance what you fork. James wrote an entire article dissecting what Git is and can do. For open source projects, GitHub is entirely free to use, which is great for programmers and collaborators. It's rather easy to look at and edit code on GitHub, and it's widespread use by coders has made it one of the biggest open source communities.

Again, while GitHub is known for its usefulness to programmers, it's also very handy for various other applications because of the collaborative spirit inherent in the GitHub community.

Travel Recommendations

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GitHub makes it easy to have multiple contributors work on the same project. This can lead to a number of creative uses related to collaboration, including travel recommendations. It's hard for one person to list all sorts of must-see places in locations all around the world. Instead, it's better to have others contribute their recommendations to the collection. Here's a great example of a travel recommendations collection.

Collaborative Writing

Writing stories isn't something where collaboration comes to mind immediately, but if you have a project where writing benefits from collaboration, GitHub is a great place to do that as well. The ease of revisions on GitHub helps the community make quick corrections to any issues they find, and keep all project files in one collection.

This is great not only for story writing, but also for editing legal documents. Of course in that scenario you'll want to make sure that any changes made are actually correct and appropriate.

Manual writing isn't out of the picture either. For example, there is currently a project about writing an introductory book to MongoDB.

Last year, Erez reviewed Prose.io for GitHub, which is a tool made specifically for writing on GitHub.

Start a Blog

GitHub also has a separate service called GitHub Pages where you can start our own blog. While not tied to GitHub's regular version control system, it's still created and run by GitHub. And don't think it's not legitimate -- President Obama used GitHub Pages for his campaign blog.

Medical Research

Because it's so easy to look into public repositories, it's also a great place to post medical research. Collaboration is a vital part for effective medical research, and posting those results on GitHub could make that a lot easier. Others can also take your research and build from it for new discoveries. You can also have discussion threads in your repository, as GitHub can support discussions related to that research. Here's a great write up on how GitHub could be useful for medical research, even if this is currently rare for GitHub.

Remixing Recipes

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Remixing other people's work can has its benefits, and cooking is an everyday example. For example, if you find a recipe on GitHub, you can fork it and make your own modifications to make it even better. Others can do the same to your work and create their own masterpieces, whether they make it even tastier or healthier (or both)! Fork the Cookbook (our review) is a great site using GitHub that revolves around finding and improving recipes. Come looking for vegan recipes or Open Source snacks!

Creating and Remixing Music

GitHub is also a great place to collaborate on musical works. Musical creativity is just right for version control. Once someone shares their music, others can enjoy it, as well as fork it and make their own modifications to it. A great example of this is collaboration on church music.

Home Repairs

With GitHub, you can also manage your home repairs. You can create "issues" which work like to-do tasks with comment support. This may not be quite as collaboration-friendly as the other ideas as others can't do the repairs for you, but you can list issues of tasks you want to complete and have others give you some ideas on how to go about a home job.

Using Geographical Data

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Got a project that revolves around plenty of geographical data? You can easily use GitHub to represent this data as a map. That's right, you don't even need to make the map yourself -- GitHub will take the data and do it for you. All you need to do is place the data inside a .geojson file and use appropriate syntax.

3D Modelling

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GitHub has started rendering 3D models that are stored in .STL files. Therefore, it's a lot easier now to share those modelling files with others, and still benefit from GitHub's contribution, sharing, and remixing features. GitHub does not have any 3D printing solutions, but it hosts project codes that are allied to the emerging area of 3D printing like Printrun and the official Make Me project.

Conclusion

Of course, this is only a small sampling of what you can do with GitHub. Ultimately, you're only limited to your imagination, as I'm sure there is an infinite number of ways where GitHub's features can be helpful to you.

In what non-programming ways have you used GitHub before? What ways did you come across but weren't involved in? Let us know in the comments!