PJ Hyett

Extranym Defined

2010-11-17T00:00:00-08:00

Extranym Defined

A few years back, a couple of GitHub guys realized there exists a phrase ambiguity with no name and Merriam-Webster won’t return our calls.

Here’s the canonical example:

“This soup is hot.”

Even with all of the context in the world, you cannot reasonably discern if the word hot in that sentence means temperature hot or spicy hot. From this, the word extranym was born. Is there already some term that covers this situation? Probably, but we haven’t found a solid answer either way.

The Beer Test

2010-05-27T00:00:00-07:00

The Beer Test

Hiring proficient people isn’t really the hard part. You can easily vet smart, motivated people by looking at their open source projects on GitHub. Hiring people you want to work with is far more important and that’s why you should take them out for beers to see how you really get along. That’s the only interesting part of the interview process for us.

Write lots of awesome code, but have a social life.

How GitHub Works

2010-02-20T00:00:00-08:00

How GitHub Works

Ryan wrote a really great comment over at rc3.org in response to an interview Scott did talking about how we work over at GitHub. Since I can’t seem to link to the comment directly, I’m reproducing it here:

Having worked in this environment for a little while, I’m not sure I agree that these are really prerequisites, but I’ll try to comment on each:

Your developers must be users of the product.

This is probably the key to everything. Seriously. Take everything below with a grain of salt.

Your developers must be able to iterate without relying too much on other members of the team.

We rely on each other quite a lot, actually. When somebody starts pasting screen caps of some concept into the campfire and they’re really good, people want to jump in and be a part of it. Sometimes you’re working on something and are totally content and loving it but you see that somebody else is really close and they could use a hand and so you make a decision to drop what you’re doing and switch over to that because, hey, let’s just ship that real quick because it’s close and it’s amazing and it’s not like the thing you’re working on has a deadline.

There’s a tremendous amount of freedom and flexibility. More times than not, that results in people using that flexibility to work together in ways that may not have been foreseen or planned.

There’s also times when people don’t jump in on a new concept. Those things may move more slowly. Maybe they should move more slowly. There’s times when something is worked on for a couple of days and then people lose interest for whatever reason. Maybe it’s not interesting.

I think this is part of what Scott was referring to when he said, open source software style of business. In an open source project, it’s hard for bad ideas to gain a lot of support. The maintainer doesn’t really get to tell other contributors what to work on. They can set a vision and tone, but an idea sinks or swims largely on its own merits and whether the people contributing feel it’s worthwhile as a collective.

I guess conventional wisdom is that team planning meetings (in whatever methodology you subscribe to) can be used to get the same results in a more orderly fashion. You get everyone in a room and you ask them, do you think this is interesting? Should we prioritize X over Y? And everyone says, Hmmmm. Yes, let’s do Y first and then X but definitely not B, and there’s debate and eventually everyone comes to an agreement and starts working on whatever was decided. There’s a lot of thinking and talking and committing involved.

The problem with the planning approach in my experience is this: what people think/say they want to do and what they really want to do (or what they’re capable of doing) are often wildly different things. It’s kind of like: put your money where your mouth is. Say you show me some thing and ask me whether I think it’s cool or valuable and I say, yeah, it’s great and I’d totally buy it, yeah. And then you say, give me $100 and you can have this thing, and now I’m not so sure. The act of actually having to take money out of my pocket and trade it for this thing is a powerful device. All the bullshit is distilled down to a very simple binary event: I pay or I go do something else. There’s no hypotheticals at that point.

I think time is kind of like that. It’s hard to tell how it’s best spent until a real person is faced with a decision to actually spend it or not spend it. At GitHub, we have a very simple voting/prioritization system: whatever people decide to work on is a priority, by definition. If something is interesting, more people end up working on it. This doesn’t mean there’s no priorities. It just means we find out about them instead of deciding on them.

And I want to stress that there’s more than just this selfish I’m-intellectually-curious-about-X-and-so-X-is-all-I’m-going-to-work-on thing going on here. You want to ship. You want to make money. You want people to love the shit you put out. You want to kick ass. You want your coworkers to kick ass. You want the site to be stable and fast and reliable. All of those things are at work all the time and they play into what you decide to work on at every moment.

The business must not have customers who are promised certain features by a certain date. Customers of every software company I’ve ever worked for have requested features that no developer wants to work on, but they pay the bills, so we worked on them anyway.

I’ll agree that dates are hard with this kind of setup, but dates are always hard. We’re just honest about it. I’d say the only difference between GitHub and most other places I’ve worked at in practice is that I apologize for being late a lot less. The same work gets done in the same amount of time, there’s just fewer estimation errors because there’s less estimating. Actually, I feel like I get more done on time because I have more freedom to take things that really aren’t time critical and shift them around because I wasn’t forced to put an artificial deadline on them in the first place.

As for working on stuff that’s tedious or maybe not immediately gratifying, that happens all the time. Again, the goal isn’t always to just work on what’s intellectually interesting. Things can be interesting for all kinds of reasons. Money is certainly interesting. Helping somebody out in a jam on a support request is interesting, even though the work might not be all that fun. Plugging a security vulnerability 20 minutes after it was reported is interesting. Fixing a bug that’s flooding your exception notification system is interesting.

I want GitHub’s availability and reliability to be unmatched. The steps required to get there aren’t all intellectually stimulating. Some of the stuff is a real chore. But I want to get there dammit. Getting there is interesting.

Also, most things are interesting to someone. There’s a few areas right now that no one has a particularly strong interest in. When things become neglected, they’re very quickly obvious. They don’t have a chance to fester. They just pop and are ugly and everybody has to look at it all the time and it’s annoying. At GitHub, those things are taken as a sign that we should consider hiring somebody who is interested in that thing. The more everyone is forced to take time away from what they would rather be doing to deal with the thing, the more pressure is created to find the person that’s going to love that thing and fix it for good.

I didn’t realize I had so much to say about this. I guess I feel like I’ve already learned a ton from these guys and am anxious to share. I’m still trying to figure out how it works so damn well myself. I doubt anyone really understands the thing. We’re all pretty good at rolling with it.

Ryan’s right that we’ve never really sat down to discuss how our process works, short of us all agreeing that we like it. I’m curious to see in the upcoming years as we continue to hire additional people how our setup evolves.

Hiring talented developers like Scott, Ryan, and Kyle lead me to believe that as long as we’re hesitant and selective about who works for us, there’s no reason we can’t carry on this way without implementing bizarre solutions to problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

I jotted down some notes on hiring people a while ago, perhaps it’s time to actually write the post.

Drinking is a Public Relations Vehicle

2009-09-15T00:00:00-07:00

Drinking is a Public Relations Vehicle

There has been a vocal minority calling out the GitHub team on our extracurricular activities recently, an opinion summed up fairly well by an anonymous commenter on the recent Engine Yard blog post about our transition to Rackspace:

PS. GitHub guys. I am no-tea-totaller, but you need to layoff the constant stream of alcohol related events, and posts on twitter, etc. Paying customers don’t react well seeing party boys whooping it up when the service continues to suffer from frequent outages, slow queues, occasional inability to push/pull, frequent breakage after code pushes, etc. You need to be seen as serious about the product you are delivering as your customers are about theirs, and behave as though committed to it 110%. Please remember that other git hosting solutions are rising up and the opportunity cost of switching git providers is low due to Git’s distributed nature.

I started to write a post in response to this, but a commenter shortly thereafter nails it so well that I’d rather just include it here:

Getting involved in developer communities, whether via social networking online or in person, is part of the GitHub guys’ jobs. Nobody can be productive at a keyboard twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Is it a crime for them to spend a couple evenings a month buying drinks for their customers and potential customers, and finding out how to better serve those customers?

I’m a paying GitHub customer, and I think they’re 110% committed while also being shrewd networkers. If you went out and had a beer with them, you could find out exactly why the site is slow and what they’re doing about it. They’re trying to do a lot with a very small team, and they’re doing a damn good job.

The next time you get up on your high horse to chastise someone for not being “110% committed”, put yourself in that position. Do you have a life? Do you do anything other than work? Do your activities outside of work directly benefit your company? Get real.

I think the truly unfortunate part is that we could put up a constant serious businessmen facade so that certain people can’t accuse of having too much fun, but what they’re failing to recognize is that we do what we do so we can meet GitHub users, figure out what they like, what they don’t like, form business relationships, meet new friends, and the list goes on and on. If there’s one thing I hope you can’t accuse our team of is that we’re unapproachable.

Any city we travel to, we always make an effort to either host an event or participate in events already happening, it’s all about community outreach and meeting new people. Would hosting a hack-fest make more sense for GitHub? Maybe, so just in case, we sponsor those too. But, when we host events at a bar, people actually talk to each other and socialize far beyond what they would do sitting in front of their laptop.

It’s amazing what a couple of beers will do to loosen up the crowd and allow folks to delve into candid conversations about our service. Make no mistake, we like going out and we like having fun, but we get to have fun and receive feedback at the same time. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

Furthermore, things like including a bottle of bourbon with our prizes is so simple and inexpensive, but surprisingly effective at spreading the word how could we not continue to do it? It works!

Truly, it may look like we’re constantly out drinking and goofing off, but I dare you to find anyone on our team that doesn’t work their ass off and care deeply about our service. We eat, sleep, and breathe GitHub and you’re only fooling yourself if you think otherwise.

Please Call Me a Fanboy

2009-01-05T00:00:00-08:00

Please Call Me a Fanboy

Reading the latest in Git fanboy criticism has felt like a time warp back to when I started learning about Rails. Just for fun here’s a quick run-down of my life for the last few years:

Four years ago I was a J2EE webapp author when I discovered Rails. It turned out writing Ruby was way more fun; I told the world about it, was promptly dismissed as a fanboy, but I stuck with it.

My Rails skills landed me a well-paying job.

Last year I was a Subversion user when I discovered Git. It turned out using Git was way more fun; I told the world about it, was promptly dismissed as a fanboy, but I stuck with it.

My Git skills landed me a spot in a successful startup (for those wondering, this was ultimately the goal after college).

I understand that your mileage may certainly vary jumping on bandwagons, but I don’t know why people are immediately dismissive when there are crowds of really enthusiastic developers.

Assuming their opinions are genuine, there’s a good chance there’s something to what they’re saying even if it isn’t always done with the greatest of tact.

This isn’t fashion design, when developers get excited about things, it normally means it’s helping them become better developers.

I’m a Rails fanboy and a Git fanboy and I don’t give a fuck who knows it.