For a Rails project I'm working on I started using the geocoder gem for zipcode validation. Unfortunately the release that was available via gem was flaky and would often crash if you queried for just a zipcode instead of a full address. With some digging around I discovered that the code in its subversion repository had some fixes applied that hadn't been pushed out to the gem, and after testing them it sure enough was much more robust. Well, this sounded like an excellent use of github! So what I've done is uploaded the SVN code to a new project, I've updated the version number and marked it as available for downloading as a gem. Go git some geocoder goodness!