Why bitbucket is great
Version control is the software miracle that nobody seems to know about until they get their first job. I've read plenty of forum posts from computer science students asking "What don't they teach you in school?", and inevitably the first response is about version control. It was true for me.

Even for solo development VC is great, and since I've known about it, I've hosted all of my code in a private Subversion repository. This makes working on my code from anywhere easy, and has the added benefit of keeping a backup of my work.

Just as I was becoming comfortable with Subversion, newer distributed version control systems popped up. As the hype around both Git and Mercurial grew, I decided it would be in my best interest to bring myself up to speed. At work we considered switching to Mercurial, mainly on the grounds that it had wider operating system compatibility, so I created myself a Bitbucket account to aid in learning. At the time, Github was exclusively git, and Bitbucket exclusively mercurial.

Both Bitbucket and Github brand themselves as "social coding" websites, but even as I began to use my Bitbucket for all my non-private projects, I never really thought about it. My main reasoning for using it was as an added facet to my resume. Because of the nature of programming, it is sometimes difficult to express your ability level, especially in an interview. Being able to point someone at a big pile of code you've written is helpful.

I really discovered why the "social" aspect of these sites is a big selling point a couple of weeks ago. I posted about GreyHolder, a little jQuery plugin that I wrote and released on my Bitbucket. What I didn't realize was that is contained a bug that could potentially throw away user input. Not very cute behavior for something that is supposed to make life easier on the user. I didn't notice the bug, but my friend Dan did. Because the code was on Bitbucket, he was able to grab it, fix the bug and then send me a pull request to grab the fix. That meant that all I had to do to fix the problem was click a button accepting his new code.

I don't know if you've ever fixed a bug with the press of a button, but it's great, and it should be (and is) the main selling point for code hosting sites. That capability is the reason I'm going to be using code hosting for all my future projects, even the private ones.