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Comment by bronson | Hacker News Reader

Seems like 20% of that slide deck is about chat rooms... GitHub still uses Campfire for chat?

I tried Campfire and Hipchat a couple years ago, neither stuck. Not sure why, maybe poor offline notifications and logging? Or maybe our team didn't have enough timezone overlap or things to chat about? Hard to say.

Is strong chat as important to Github as Zach implies?

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Absolutely.

As I mentioned, we have 150+ rooms that we chill in, and most of our day-to-day work practices are tied into chat. Mention someone's name in a room they're not present in and we send push notifications to their phone and desktop- works great to pull people in as needed, without needing to distract them with the noise of being in the room 24/7.

Our ops team is particularly in deep with chat. Instead of siloing everyone's process off individually in SSH sessions, many operations happen in chat, so everyone can learn and help out when diagnosing problems. They've built some really fascinating tooling around the problems they face- if you're interested, check out @jnewland's talk on ChatOps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST3u-GjjFw

Great post Zach!

Tom Preson Warner, GitHubs founder and CEO (and creator of TOML[1]), also gave a very good overview of how GitHub works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Ms-...

Tim Berglund recently talked in details about the PRPs and the product development process: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/berglund-product-owners

[1] https://github.com/mojombo/toml

I still don't get how do you manage to do security-sensitive things in Campfire via Hubot :-/

I've been working on adding configuration management via environment variables at work. We allow setting configs via the command line, but it posts a notification to our devops room in Hipchat showing who made the change, and which config was changed, but not the new value.

This means that people can see what is going on, without having full access to the settings which may be sensitive.

I suppose you could also set sensitive credentials in a one on one chat with Hubot.

I've seen this done by locking the room, too. That way, everyone in the room when you make the change sees everything (and can check your work), but it's not recorded in the transcripts.

This probably works great for all-hacker teams, but I think it's worth pointing out that some people don't like typing or otherwise aren't comfortable expressing themselves in text. I work with some people who simply refuse to use online collaboration tools. Were I starting a company, I probably wouldn't hire them, but I wonder if there's something to be done about this.

My team uses Slack (http://slack.com) and is very happy with it. It's in active development, and has good cross-platform clients. (Flint for Campfire is great, but last time I asked they didn't have any way to do volume licensing)

We've been on HipChat for a bit now. Campfire seemed a bit ugly to our tastes.

We don't use chat so much for the Hubot-ish stuff, but I have enjoyed using Robut[0] as a culture tool. I usually serve it directly from my computer, which is fun.

https://github.com/justinweiss/robut

All the teams I have been part of have used chat together with Github. First team used Campfire, on the second team we started out with Hipchat, but we decided to give Flowdock a try, and now we can't live without the chat threads that Flowdock provides.

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