Open Source (Almost) Everything. Tom Preston-Werner on the different reasons open source is advantageous to Github: it’s great advertising, it’s a “force multiplier” that produces better code, and it helps keep the best people at your company.
Another thing GitHub does well is automate tedious — and important — tasks. There’s a very strong culture of building mini-apps and Hubot scripts if it helps with automation.
There’s two reasons for why we push hard on this. The first is most obvious: you’re letting a scripted process save you time so you can focus on doing real work. The second is more subtle: automation reduces institutional knowledge. Institutional knowledge leads to a minority group inside of the company retaining answers. That forces new employees to bother those few in order to make impactful changes. It becomes a very verbal, synchronous process, which we try to avoid.
Zach Holman — Scaling GitHub’s Employees.
WordPress Github Plugin Updater. Have your plugin auto-update from Github instead of WordPress.org.
Using Github has changed, and continues to change, my development practices, by making me think more about audience and reuse (notions that are familiar to teachers of writing), encouraging the “release early and often” mantra (since all my stuff is public anyway more or less as soon as I write it), and orienting me toward collaboration by default, rather than solo coding. All these changes are highly laudable, leading to better product, and making my work more fun.
Boone Gorges — Musings on Git and Github.
Greg Linch led a 3 pm session in room 4 on applying GitHub (and Git) to news. Andrew Spittle and I collaborated on live Google Doc notes. Here’s Greg’s previous blog post on the topic. Continue reading
iOctocat. Full-blown iPhone application for GitHub.
Why GitHub Hacks on Side Projects. Side projects rekindle excitement. Hubot is a Campfire bot that can: unlock the door to the office, print a list of people currently in the office based on their wifi presence, track and map packages, and more.
A few days back, Saturday to be exact, the crazy notion I should spend dozens of hours doing content analysis on The Locals came to my mind. For my Carnival of Journalism blog post, I want to paint a clear picture of what university-sponsored hyperlocal journalism is like today. This can then be a foundation for any bushy-eyed speculation I might do about the future.
Sunday evening, I created a Github repository for two reasons: to see how my code is evolving and to track step by step how I’m putting this data together. After all, journalism must be reproducible.
Now that it’s closer to deadline, I want to open the floor. What data points would you like to see established about The Locals? As of right now, I know that the LEV (Local East Village) produced 100 blog posts in November 2010 from 29 authors and 19 community contributors. The FGCH (Fort Greene-Clinton Hill) produced 105 blog posts in November 2010 from 23 authors and 23 community contributors. The rest of the questions I’ve established are in my research notes.
P.S. Another part of the experiment is to see how well Git works as a versioned authoring tool.
URL Design. Github has the best URLs ever.
wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.7.2.3.tar.gz
tar -xvf git-1.7.2.3.tar.gz
cd git-1.7.2.3
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install
If you’re reading this in the future, you may want to use the most recent version of Git. Instructions via the always helpful WebFaction support team
