Open Source code doesn’t always come in big complex packages. At ProPublica we sometimes share small, simple snippets of using GitHub "Gists." These Gists range from single-byte file delimiters to an entire JavaScript framework for making stepper graphics. They rarely have documentation and don’t even always have names, but they can be super-useful. Here are some we’ve shared over the past few years:
- A simple way to grab remote template elements in your Rails app (after Brian Boyer's RemoteSnippets) https://gist.github.com/1664329
- A single byte gist that contains ASCII character 28, which the FEC uses as a field delimiter. https://gist.github.com/2191300
- A [quine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing) in Ruby https://gist.github.com/523940
- Check links on a page using JavaScript [https://gist.github.com/