How GitHub Builds Products

Given at GoToAarhus 2013.

Transcript

1. How GitHub Builds Products 
2. What is GitHub?
3. Best place to design, build, and ship software
4. We started out just hacking on problems that we had with developing software
5. We've kept that mentality; you should be able to work on cool things that interest you
6. This is how we hire
7. This is how we move between roles
8. This is how we build products and software
9. Use the community for what they're good at Lesson 1:
10. "Simple: at GitHub we hire 'The Girl or Guy Who Wrote X,' where X is an awesome project we all use or admire. What's your X?" - Chris Wanstrath
11. We built a lot of GitHub on existing open source
12. Or we open sourced almost everything we built in the process
13. Grit
14. Grit Ernie
15. Grit Ernie Resque
16. Grit Ernie Resque Hubot
17. Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen
18. Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen Albino
19. Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen Albino Akavanche
20. Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen Albino Linguist Akavanche
21. Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen Albino Linguist Shimmer Akavanche
22. Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen Albino Linguist Shimmer Akavanche ETC
23. We need these projects to run our company, why not share them!
24. Now we can see who would work on them with us
25. We not only open source things, but use others' open source as well
26. Rails' success comes from the community, how much people loved it, and how much they want to use it
27. People within the community either worked on Rails itself, or gems that became essential for many projects
28. They sound like people we can get along with!
29. It's also super easy to evaluate their code and what working with them would be like by seeing their commits on existing projects
30. Rick "Risk Danger" Olson TECHNOWEENIE
32. attachment_fu
33. attachment_fu acts_as_authenticated
34. attachment_fu acts_as_authenticated restful-authentication
35. attachment_fu acts_as_authenticated restful-authentication Beast and Mophisto
36. attachment_fu acts_as_authenticated restful-authentication Beast and Mephisto Rails
37. Early work within the rails community made him stand out. His code interested us and we used some of it too!
38. Josh Peek Josh
39. rack
40. rack rack-mount
41. rack rack-mount rack-ssl
42. rack rack-mount rack-ssl tilt
43. rack rack-mount rack-ssl tilt Rails
44. Not only were they working on the tools that drove our company, they contributed to employees' open source projects as well
45. If you're going to hire people to work on your products, it helps if they're already working on open source parts of that product
46. Let your employees find things they love working on, and see them grow into roles they love Lesson 2:
47. 3D printed objects
51. "But we don't have a 3D printer. So we should get one. That's everything." -Mike Skalnik
52. 2 weeks later a printer showed up
53. "This is great! I can print real things!"
57. Things slow down when you have over 180 employees trying to print something
58. Mike Skalnik (@skalnik) proposes coming into the office on a Saturday to work on Hubot integration
59. Slava Shirokov (@sshirokov) also came into the office to help
60. Hubot integration done, camera set up to view it, amazing
61. What if we could collaborate on these models before we finalize them?
62. What platform would be good to collaborate on?
63. Render
65. A few people had an interest in 3d models; it turned into rendering on GitHub for everyone
66. Sean Bryant (@sbryant) has been helping a lot lately too.
68. Add Ben Balter (@benbalter). "Let's work with MapBox to show map data on github.com"
69. Showing maps in repositories
73. Points of interest in a city
74. Points of interest in a city Good wifi locations
75. Points of interest in a city Good wifi locations Political districts
76. Points of interest in a city Good wifi locations Political districts Fire hydrants
77. Small hack projects can turn into amazing new features
78. Let your employees work on things that interest them. They'll pour so much passion into it.
79. See a problem within an app you use, start to fix it slowly. Then iterate often and turn it into a full product Lesson 3:
81. We love building things ourselves
82. You don't always have the luxury of time to do this
83. You don't always have the luxury of time to do this
84. It may end up cheaper to use an existing product
85. As you grow, this may start to not be true
86. You'll notice pain in using it. And you'll deal with it
87. But then you can't deal with it
88. We started making really small changes. Just to increase some efficiency.
89. Efficiency went up for a while, then our user base grew faster and we had more issues 
90. Well, they have an API. Why don't we use that?
91. Still using them as a database and application server
92. Still have some problems
93. Maybe we could ask the company for more help
94. Eventually we would want customization Maybe we could ask the company for more help
95. We realized we should just hire more people for this
97. Support
98. Developers
99. It may take a few iterations, but you can have your cake and eat it too
100. Build for need as it arrises instead of just putting all your eggs in one basket from the start
101. How does GitHub Build Products?
102. Find people who share your interest or are already helping you
103. Allow people to explore new horizons and find new interest. It'll pay off for you in the end one way or another
104. Start small, iterate fast, and keep doing the smallest thing possible to ship something that works
105. Thank you brent@github.com @brntbeer Start Building Brent Beer
106. References Who we hire - http://ozmm.org/posts/who_we_hire.html Open Source Almost Everything -http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open- source-everything.html How to Open Source a Project - https://gist.github.com/atmos/6631554 Slides - http://bit.ly/GH-products-aar13