I use it for snippets of code that I want to save (and, maybe, make publicly available and link to) but aren’t serious enough for a repo. Here are some examples from [my gists](https://gist.github.com/Sidnicious):

- https://gist.github.com/1173880: A chunk of code to get information about running processes.

- https://gist.github.com/1082933: A little JavaScript function to decode quoted-printable encoding

- https://gist.github.com/842476: A chunk of code that blocks (I wrote it for a startup daemon) until the OS’s network stack is ready.

- https://gist.github.com/c980470f5ef244c4b4d3: My and a friend’s solution to the last level of Stripe’s CTF (may not be the final version)

- https://gist.github.com/2586751: A patch against a JSON library that to make it handle escapes in a spec-compliant way.

…Some of them are useful as-is, others are useful as reminders of how I dealt with a particular problem in case I run into it again.

Most users (myself included) seem to use it primarily as a better pastebin than most of the pastebins on the Web. It's tied to your account (so you can manage previously posted Gists easily), it's versioned and available over git as an ad hoc repository, and the highlighting is pretty good.

What I find puzzling is seeing what appear to be blog posts published as gists.

What's the reasoning for this? I imagine if you don't have a blog of any kind it fills in, but it seems a odd place to publish lengthy essays.

I think there's a couple of sites that take markdown in a Gist and put them up as formatted posts.

Add Disqus and you've got a neat little product.

Looking through both my secret and public gists, I've used it for

- lecture notes

- collection of resources

- snippets of code (for myself or remote teammates)

- todo lists

- tutoring

- and more...

its a slightly better looking http://pastie.org/. sharing snippets of code is quite useful, especially if the team is a remote team.