I have a small app on my computer that I wrote myself. It’s
small and simple, and it’s the default application for opening BitTorrent files on our computers. When I
download one of these files the app takes the file and moves it to a folder on
the server. This folder is watched by my torrent
client of choice which runs on the server and immediately starts the
download when it sees the file.

The app then pops up a notification to the user to ask if
they want to be directed to the deluge web interface to see the download
progress.

I rewrote the app about a year ago. The original version was
written in RealStudio but the
location of the watched folder and the URL for Deluge’s web interface were
hard-coded in: a reasonable design decision given it was just a small app for
only my use one, but still a poor one – when a change I made to my network
configuration required me to adjust these variables I no longer had a copy of
RealStudio available.

I wrote a new version in Visual
Basic 2010 Express, and this time I did a little extra work to take the
configuration variables out of the source code and put them into an .ini file.

Why am I telling you all this?

Well, not that I think you’d need the app, but I have today
made the source code
(and the compiled executable, for good measure) publicly available on my brand
new GitLab account!

I’ve been using Git for a while (and I’ve written about it once
or twice
before), but I really haven’t been taking advantage of its featureset.

I’m working on something right now that’s big and complex
and I value having version control and branches to work with. I already have
Git installed on my server (both my home server and my public webserver), but
I’ve downloaded a windows Git client
to compliment that setup and opened a GitLab account to use as an external
repository and a means to eventually make a finished product public.

Why have I chosen GitLab over the more ubiquitous GitHub? GitHub makes you pay to host a private
repository, and I want somewhere where I can both host code that’s a work in
progress (and not ready for public distribution) and distribute completed code
that’s ready for download, public review and maybe even improvement by the
wider community. GitLab gives me free private repositories for
partially-completed things that I can later make public once I’m ready to.

I’ve already created a couple of public repositories, mostly
to test the platform out, and TorrentApp is one of them.

So use it if it’s a tool that might be useful to you,
improve upon it if you have the expertise, and send me a merge request so I
can incorporate your changes into the code!