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Google at GitHub

github.com

243 pointsadambyrtek85 comments

Google is still very committed to providing a great place to host open source projects at http://code.google.com/hosting, that has not changed. But many of us are also fans of GitHub, and recognize that there is a great community of developers there (particularly in the ruby community).

The Google account on GitHub has been setup simply as a place where some open source Google projects can be mirrored. As another commenter noted, this is actually one of the points of a DVCS.

What's the model for contributing patches going to look like? With GitHub projects, the usual method is to create a fork, do some work, and send in a pull request with a descriptive note. If it's easy to contribute, more people will do it; this is one of the big reasons why so many people are fans of GitHub.

Will contributing to the projects mirrored here be that easy?

"But many of us are also fans of GitHub, and recognize that there is a great community of developers there (particularly in the ruby community)", that's an interesting comment. Does Google care about Ruby?

Yes, we do. :)

While it doesn't get as much use as other languages internally, there certainly are a number of in-house projects that use it.

But more importantly, developers accessing our public APIs use Ruby. We maintain a number of client libraries to make accessing our APIs easier. (We also maintain similar libraries in Objective-C and C#, for example.)

Not to mention that Sketchup uses Ruby for scripting: http://code.google.com/apis/sketchup/

No, but google wants to dismiss github as being viable for communities outside of ruby. Especially when they compete with github on some level.

So the google github account was started just a few days ago and is completely empty right now...and yet Githire ranks it as the "Top 1%" by estimated experience.

http://githire.com/profiles/google

That's some predictive algorithm it's got going

Hasn't it already been established multiple times that Githire is garbage? You even have to link your Github account to it to opt out. What a joke.

This actually took longer than I expected to make it to the front page of Hn. I kind of wish it had waited until all of the repositories were filled out though.

I like how people have already forked the empty repositories.

None of the projects are forked (at least as of now), but thee are quite a few people watching them. That's not really surprising, though, because it seems perfectly valid to watch a project while waiting for the first commit.

yea because google is known for their extensive ruby usage

Google no, but Iliya yes (Google acquired PostRank).

I can't seem to follow them, and I do hope Google starts using Github instead of Google Code. Github is by far the best website for open source projects.

It's all mainly due to using git and its interface. Github has a great website design.

The thing I like the most about GitHub is that it puts the code first. You go to a web site, and you see these things, in roughly this order:

1. The code.

2. A descriptive readme, which GitHub has successfully trained people how to write.

3. Some miscellaneous buttons and stuff.

This definitely leads to a jump-in-and-hack approach, unlike project sites where you end up clicking through a bunch of crap to get to the code. On Google Code, for instance, you have to click on the Source tab, then a tiny link somewhere on the page, and the code browser isn't even that good.

This is the thing I hate about github.

Hacked up code is all fine and good, but what I'm looking for are the tools that are necessary to make it easy to consume the code:

* Stable, versioned releases, with sufficient API (if not ABI) compatibility across releases.

* Accurate and complete API documentation (with bonus points for higher-level integration documentation.

* A bug tracking system

* Mailing lists.

These are all historically accepted best-practices that have (and continue) to serve the OSS community well, but they're also practices that are strongly and innately de-emphasized by github's "code first" UX.

If github (and git) were facilitating the production of marvelous new libraries and software that we'd never seen before, then maybe I'd acquiesce that it's worthwhile to abandon the best practices above.

That, however, has not been my experience. Most of the code is poorly maintained, often abandon-ware, and with unclear lineage. It's unknown which of the 50 forks is the best one to use at any given time, and what the ongoing costs will be to track unstable development branches directly, since there are no releases.

You make some important points. Let's go through that list and try to figure out how to make things better:

> Stable, versioned releases, with sufficient API (if not ABI) compatibility across releases.

When people do this on GitHub, the usual method is to create a release tag for each version. GitHub offers tarballs of the repo at each version tag, and can quickly switch views of the code.

I try to always use proper semantic versioning once my software reaches maturity, and I've never noticed GitHub getting in the way of that.

> Accurate and complete API documentation (with bonus points for higher-level integration documentation.

There are a variety of Right Ways to do this, and it varies by language. In Haskell, for example, the most popular form of API documentation is automatically generated from the code and specially-formatted comments by Haddock. For other languages, there are various competing ways of doing API docs, from writing the stuff manually up through a number of doc extraction tools.

I think the ideal way for GitHub to handle this would be to introduce a separate docs repo for each project, serve up the generated HTML, and put out some tools for updating it. This is similar to what they do with project wikis.

This would require the cooperation of external tools to be easy, but the GitHub guys have enough fame that they could probably start a flood of tools if they just get it started.

> A bug tracking system

GitHub has a rudimentary form of this, but it would be nice if they could insert prominent links to external bug trackers, so people could use their favorite one. Barring that, sticking a clearly-labeled link in the top-level readme file is a decent approximation.

> Mailing lists.

Google Groups is a decent approximation of this. Again, it would be nice if there were a standard way to insert links to external mailing list pages in GitHub projects.

Any more problems or solutions?

     the ideal way for GitHub to handle this would be
     to introduce a separate docs repo for each project

In a GitHub project you can create a gh-pages branch. In this branch you can place HTML files that will get rendered at http://username.github.com/project-name/ ... This is automated by GitHub in the Admin tab of any project. Simply select the option GitHub Pages and it will generate a branch with a basic index.html for you, that also has a download link.

See http://pages.github.com/ for more details.

as best I can tell, that appears to be a limitation of organizations on GitHub. For example, it doesn't look like you can follow github.com/facebook or github.com/yahoo either.

is there any evidence this is legitimate?

The fact that the account was just started 1 week ago suggests to me that Github had been preventing squatting on the account until it was official.

You are right, I tried with Microsoft: http://i.imgur.com/PJiOy.png

https://github.com/microsoft/

Microsoft is on github. Github should let these teams setup an organization under Microsoft as a pointer.

https://github.com/microsoft-dpe

https://github.com/Microsoft-Interop

https://github.com/WindowsAzure

That would require these various teams at Microsoft to act as if they were a single organization. This has historically been difficult for teams at Microsoft.

Right? Apparently they can't even agree on whether or not they want caps or dashes in their organization names.

Which matters!

I'm working on this. And, yes, it's difficult.

What is funny is that some of the same engineers are on all these github accounts.

Indeed but it does not change DevX101's point. Also it is strange they did not request the microsoft account

This Github account is definitely run by Googlers (Will Norris and Ilya Grigorik). It was announced on one of the internal mailing lists a few days ago as a companion to code.google.com for things like rubygems, not as a replacement of any kind.

any chance they (or github, or someone else) will enable bidirectional syncing of changes? It'd be nice to see 2 or 3 of the ones out there support not just importing, but also methods for automating the syncing of changes, especially if that means that I can do a github pull request and it automagically becomes a branch or patch file sent to an svn-hosted project.

Is "Move along." the default message for an empty repo? It seems.. unfriendly.

You know this is a movie reference, right?

If you still doubt it head your way to http://github.com/2394157ysajkfhkly5husdafjkasghf which produces an astoundingly familiar 404 message...

I personally wouldn't have known "Move along" was a Star Wars reference, though I knew about the 404.

For the still confused, here is the quote: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/quotes?qt=qt0440731

and here is the clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzcWPKAv2Ow

Oh. 2 words don't a quote make. Otherwise I might as well say:

  "need to" -- Obi Wan

Yes, picking the words is important, but the number of words is unimportant. Consider the minimal example: "Khannnnnnnn!"

It does when those two words happen to be a complete (and fairly iconic) line.

It produces a 404 until I create a github account with that name.

I don't think you really need to be friendly for an empty repo for users who can't admin the repo.

bye bye google code?

There is nothing here, they are simply preventing spoofing probably. Move along, move along...

code.google.com is a big -- if not the biggest -- Github rival, which makes this move seem like Google is waving the white flag.

I wouldn't be surprised if an acquisition is coming.

I wouldn't say either of these statements are true. This is a DVCS doing what it should do: the source is easily distributed across multiple platforms. That's not a white flag, that's just embracing the technology. Remember that Google is supposed to want what is best for the web, it builds products to support that goal, but that philosophy doesn't preclude using other products (for example, Google is on Twitter).

Google Code is not going away, certainly. And I don't think Google has any real interest in GitHub: it's a product that would require such a large amount of retooling to work on Google's architecture that it would be cheaper to clone missing features into Google Code.

I don't think GitHub has the cheddar to acquire Google.

Normally jokes are an unwanted distraction around here, but this is pretty amusing.

I wouldn't be surprised if GitHubbers say 'no' to said acquisition.

Remember: "optimizing for happiness".

They'd never do it.

Consider GitHub's tiers of employees:

founders => early 2 or 3 => next 10 => next 50

How much cash does Github have to keep the last 50 or the next 150 feeling special? This is where managing the business starts to get really hard.

I'd assume that the GH founders and first tier employees have probably each banked about $1M so far. A Google acquisition valued at $30-50M would set all of them up nicely and let them move on to other endeavors.

In my opinion, only a very generous profit sharing program or a planned acquisition strategy explains the complete lack of rogue employees blogging their gripes. Keep in mind all the drama at Twitter when it was small.

Believe it or not, cash isn't the only thing that makes people feel special.

Maybe we just want to build an amazing company.

I don't disagree with that at all, but the cynic in me feels like even with such an amazing team the org stuff gets harder (cash aside) as the company grows.

However, GH has always exceeded all of my expectations in every possible way, so good luck to you guys whatever path you choose.

GitHub is a lifestyle company. They are in the business of running the best business they can. Everything else is secondary.

Working for someone else's business doesn't fit into that model.

> Remember: "optimizing for happiness".

Right, and nothing says "unhappiness" like $100M or $200M.

One notable difference is that you cannot give Google money in order to get private repositories.

For private work I've been doing Google Code by far best matches our needs. (Your needs will be different.) One place we use Github and the other is Bitbucket. I really wish Google would take our money.

> I really wish Google would take our money.

they'd have to start offering support - I think they don't like to

In all cases the companies are already using Google Apps for Domains and so are already at the mercy of Google's "support".

Keep in mind that support for paying customers is very different than support for 13-year-olds that want to use a pseudonym on Google+.

One startup we are paying and one we aren't. Paying does give you a phone number to call. However it doesn't give you anyone useful that answers the call.

http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=1829

You might want to start that issue. Helps express a desire for the feature.

Comment #125 over a year ago :)

I guess this would officially mark having code on github a status symbol for both developers and companies :D

What about Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft who already had open source projects there?

Google should acquire GitHub and let the GitHubbers run Google.

Oh no, please no! I really hope Google never acquires Github.

I love Github but if they sell to Google, it will be goodbye.

I concur.

I know! It would be horrible to have the service be free, and integrated with Google's other search and social features and therefore more visible to the world!

THE HORROR!!1

In all seriousness, I’m happy for them to index my public repositories, but no, I don’t want my email program to show me “relevant” ads based on my private repositories or integrate the contents of my private repositories into their profile of mine.

How would one advertise based on the contents of a repository anyways? Searching for a lot of swearing in the commit messages and recommending anger management?

On a serious note, I would guess that having your commit history and cross referencing it with the issues db (seeing things you closed or breaks caused by your code) might be quite interesting to a recruiter and a source of some pretty targeted (read: expensive) advertising.

[edit: not to mention company lawyers looking to sue some NDA violating employees]

I can think of a few ways.

Perhaps you could grep for common libraries like "ffmpeg" and make a guess as to what sort of software it is. Maybe a video editor/player in the case of ffmpeg. Once you figure that out, you could show advertisements for the same sort of software.

I wouldn't want to have to use my real name via a Google+ account in order to commit code.

Google often kills off the product when they acquire the company.

But they steal the good features. Etherpad's functionality is now in Docs, for example.

I think most of githubs innovations could likely be added to google code without acquiring github. The technology isn't really what makes github special.

The etherpad developers were hired to help work on wave. Google docs implemented collaborative editing independently of etherpad and the wave team.

I've come to the conclusion that a lot of you have an issue with sarcasm even when it's obviously marked :(

site:github.com <terms> is all the integration that I need.

So it's already free, it's already integrated into Google's search, if I want to be social about what I'm coding I can easily share it on G+...

What problems would be solved by doing anything differently?

If Google bought it and nothing changed I'd be happy!!! However, I don't think that'd be the case. Things would change and I suspect for the worse, since it's not a big cash cow like search is.

Yeah and if they buy github maybe they can integrate social coding features using Google Plus and force hackers to code using their real names. The horror...

people like you, forgetting the "" the html 4.00 way, are ruining the internez

My favorite response was on Quora where someone asked a similar question and mentioned that "Most GitHubbers wouldn't even pass a Google interview". I certainly wouldn't. And would promptly get myself fired within the week.

Only if you swear at all the interviewers Holman. (jokes :D)

The biggest problem with google acquiring github is that github would be expected to integrate with google's infrastructure; which would be a monumental engineering task. I can't see that happening in any way that wouldn't hurt github somehow. The best case would be that months of github's engineering time is taken away from new features. The worst case is that github is integrated with google code somehow; which would probably result in a revolt by github's users.

I think an acquisition by google would only hurt the open source community. Google likes us too much to risk that.

That's utterly chilling. They'd definitely do another snuff job and then put out a cutesy video about how they're making all this mean old complex stuff quirky and easy and fun.

christ, don't even joke

And if they did acquire GitHub, then I'm sure they'd make all private repos free and create even more of an incentive to use the service. And perhaps the GitHub FE would simply then come bundled with a Google Search Appliance?

I am trying to imagine ad placement analytics based on commits and projects watched...

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