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How GitHub Builds Products 

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What is GitHub?

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Best place to design, build, and ship software

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We started out just hacking on problems that we had with developing software

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We've kept that mentality; you should be able to work on cool things that interest you

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This is how we hire

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This is how we move between roles

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This is how we build products and software

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Use the community for what they're good at Lesson 1:

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"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

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We built a lot of GitHub on existing open source

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Or we open sourced almost everything we built in the process

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Grit

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Grit Ernie

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Grit Ernie Resque

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Grit Ernie Resque Hubot

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Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen

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Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen Albino

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Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen Albino Akavanche

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Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen Albino Linguist Akavanche

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Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen Albino Linguist Shimmer Akavanche

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Grit Ernie Resque Hubot Boxen Albino Linguist Shimmer Akavanche ETC

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We need these projects to run our company, why not share them!

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Now we can see who would work on them with us

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We not only open source things, but use others' open source as well

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Rails' success comes from the community, how much people loved it, and how much they want to use it

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People within the community either worked on Rails itself, or gems that became essential for many projects

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They sound like people we can get along with!

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It's also super easy to evaluate their code and what working with them would be like by seeing their commits on existing projects

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Rick "Risk Danger" Olson TECHNOWEENIE

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attachment_fu

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attachment_fu acts_as_authenticated

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attachment_fu acts_as_authenticated restful-authentication

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attachment_fu acts_as_authenticated restful-authentication Beast and Mophisto

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attachment_fu acts_as_authenticated restful-authentication Beast and Mephisto Rails

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Early work within the rails community made him stand out. His code interested us and we used some of it too!

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Josh Peek Josh

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rack

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rack rack-mount

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rack rack-mount rack-ssl

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rack rack-mount rack-ssl tilt

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rack rack-mount rack-ssl tilt Rails

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Not only were they working on the tools that drove our company, they contributed to employees' open source projects as well

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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

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Let your employees find things they love working on, and see them grow into roles they love Lesson 2:

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3D printed objects

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"But we don't have a 3D printer. So we should get one. That's everything." -Mike Skalnik

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2 weeks later a printer showed up

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"This is great! I can print real things!"

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Things slow down when you have over 180 employees trying to print something

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Mike Skalnik (@skalnik) proposes coming into the office on a Saturday to work on Hubot integration

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Slava Shirokov (@sshirokov) also came into the office to help

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Hubot integration done, camera set up to view it, amazing

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What if we could collaborate on these models before we finalize them?

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What platform would be good to collaborate on?

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Render

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A few people had an interest in 3d models; it turned into rendering on GitHub for everyone

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Sean Bryant (@sbryant) has been helping a lot lately too.

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Add Ben Balter (@benbalter). "Let's work with MapBox to show map data on github.com"

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Showing maps in repositories

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Points of interest in a city

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Points of interest in a city Good wifi locations

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Points of interest in a city Good wifi locations Political districts

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Points of interest in a city Good wifi locations Political districts Fire hydrants

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Small hack projects can turn into amazing new features

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Let your employees work on things that interest them. They'll pour so much passion into it.

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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:

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We love building things ourselves

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You don't always have the luxury of time to do this

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You don't always have the luxury of time to do this

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It may end up cheaper to use an existing product

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As you grow, this may start to not be true

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You'll notice pain in using it. And you'll deal with it

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But then you can't deal with it

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We started making really small changes. Just to increase some efficiency.

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Efficiency went up for a while, then our user base grew faster and we had more issues 

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Well, they have an API. Why don't we use that?

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Still using them as a database and application server

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Still have some problems

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Maybe we could ask the company for more help

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Eventually we would want customization Maybe we could ask the company for more help

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We realized we should just hire more people for this

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Support

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Developers

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It may take a few iterations, but you can have your cake and eat it too

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Build for need as it arrises instead of just putting all your eggs in one basket from the start

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How does GitHub Build Products?

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Find people who share your interest or are already helping you

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Allow people to explore new horizons and find new interest. It'll pay off for you in the end one way or another

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Start small, iterate fast, and keep doing the smallest thing possible to ship something that works

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Thank you [email protected] @brntbeer Start Building Brent Beer

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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