Make yours and other people's life easier! Do support! (OSDC Edition)

Operations people often strive for the perfect solution. But is that really effective? To answer that question for yourself, you’ll have to spend some time doing support!

Here at GitHub developers help out with support on a regular basis, leading to a better experience for our customers. Some even work on both: half development, half support. I'm going to show you why I think support is awesome and how it benefits your work!

Transcript

1. ! How we run Support
 at GitHub
2. ! ! Why help out with
 Customer Support?
3. ! ! Someone talking about Support, … here?
12. GitHub makes it easier to work
 together than to work alone!
13. ! ! Ermahgerd, why Support?
17. 1876 1894 20th century
21. ! ! Support at GitHub?
22. !
23. !
24. !
27. ! " # $ # % % % % Account Technical Sales Enterprise # $ $ $ $ $ $$ $ $ $
32. Huge props to the GitHub Supportocats! Avatars had a gnarly caching issue that generated a fair number of support requests. ! I also got to work with a bunch of new Hubbers I haven't worked with before, so that's always fun.
34. !
35. !
36. ! ! Core principles
37. NO FIGHTS
38. NO INSULTS
39. NO EXCUSES
40. NO SUPERPOWERS
41. NO ADVERTISING
42. tl;dr: Be a human! Be nice!
43. ! ! Birth of a Superfan™!
44. User: Totally loving what you did with the Windows client and been loyally using it since it came out. But does it really need to take up 2.5GB of space? :(
45. User: Totally loving what you did with your Windows client and been loyally using it since it came out. But does it really need to take up 2.5GB of space? :( Paul Betts: That's totally not cool (and not expected)! Can you tell us specifically which folders are taking up so much space?
46. Paul Betts: That's totally not cool (and not expected)! Can you tell us specifically which folders are taking up so much space? User: Totally loving what you did with your Windows client and been loyally using it since it came out. But does it really need to take up 2.5GB of space? :( User: As soon as I get back home, I'll send you the juicy details. That will happen tomorrow. ! I must say I'm positively surprised by your responsiveness. Thought it would take a day or two at the least for any reply to arrive!
47. User: We're starting to experience increasingly frequent connectivity errors from our Microsoft azure virtual machine to github. ! We get a connection error a majority of the time. Microsoft: As the plan currently stands, any customer reporting this problem will be directed to open a new case with Microsoft, but to reference case #123. This will allow us to coordinate the work on both sides until we can figure this out. It will also eliminate the confusion caused when GitHub or customers reference the old case #123.
48. Microsoft: As the plan currently stands, any customer reporting this problem will be directed to open a new case with Microsoft, but to reference case #123. This will allow us to coordinate the work on both sides until we can figure this out. ! We will still work with individual customers until we have a solid repro, but we will also keep the master case updated with the associated cases and any specific findings. ! P.S. When I am back in the office on Monday, let's talk about how we can manage the individual cases that come in. User: We're starting to experience increasingly frequent connectivity errors from our Microsoft azure virtual machine to github. ! We get a connection error a majority of the time.
50. ! ! Why help out?
51. Stable service
52. Valuable insights
53. Other applications
54. Who? Them!
55. Learning by doing
57. ! Thanks! Image credits: Otto Yamamoto * Trevor Coultart * butupa * Davide Simonelli * Daniel Imfeld * Adam Fagen * Alexandre Duret-Lutz * Matthew Knight
 James Forsyth * Michael Kuhn * J. Michel Carriere * Andrew Eason * 401 K * Chris Isherwood * Travis * Benjamin Golub * Mark Faviell
 Costa Ricas Callcenter * Arbeitgeberverband Gesamtmetall * United States Forces * Drew Bennett * Quinn Dombrowski * Anne-Sophie Want to follow-up? @fooforge || mike@github.com