New Year, New CEO for GitHub
github.com
github.com
2014 should be a great year for them.
I'd love to see things fixed up in their issue tracker, and you still can't apply a label to a pull request while looking at the pull request.
I love GitHub for many reasons, but I question whether the push towards 'managerless-culture' means some less interesting things don't get done sometimes.
I do note the ability to see web traffic prior to someone's implementation of a hack to do it on HackerNews, but on the other hand, I still miss the impact graph. How about being able to see number of clones and updates instead of just web traffic?
The ways to spotlight interesting new projects is great, but I think the social and discovery aspects could be upgraded too.
But #1, the bug tracker needs help. Code review tools seem nice, but are seemingly enterprise only. While I welcome and encourage that kind of business model, large open source projects could benefit the most from that kind of functionality.
So, yeah, GitHub is becoming the standard for code sharing. It's great... but there's a lot of opportunity not being capitalized on too relative to their organizational size.
From the outside, it looks like they are probably dealing more with internal plumbing than new functionality to me. Which is also understandable. It's just a shame that some features that are quite useful (say, impact graph) get cut or uninteresting to work on (issue tracking) don't get worked on.
Have you hit the "t" key on the site?
They also raised $800m in mid-2012: http://pando.com/2012/05/21/bootstrapped-github-now-raising-...
But in the rest you are correct.
98% of my work is private and all employers get to see is about 100 open-source commits when I have roughly 4,000 commits throughout several private organizations. I know I need more open source contributions but I should be able to prove to an employer that I am a heavy Github user and have more experience than 100 commits.
Sometimes I've been asked to send a screenshot of my total number of commits, and happily oblige to the odd request but a screenshot is not even worth it's weight in the physical world (aka nothing).
To be clear, I don't have an issue with github contributions being seen as a plus for hiring... but trying to turn this into something concretely quantifiable via total commit count (especially on commits you can't even see) seems crazy to me.
Please let me know which employers are asking you for this information so I can avoid applying to them in the future!
-They are assuming I have little to no experience in a service they use every day.
-They are assuming I don't contribute to Open Source in any way (I contribute to private repos that are at the core of several large OS projects but are private for business concerns).
-Github provides an easy metric to see what most of my work is. I can see that 45% of my work is done in Python, and maybe the rest in front-end tech. That would be useful information to an employer if I apply to an Obj-C position.
Actually the work I am most proud of is in my side-projects, which I would much rather employers go on and interact with rather than scour over the github repo. Posted above is not just something I want, but something I see much more value in for Github to become a more friendly intermediary between employer/employee.
That's like going up to Elon Musk and asking, why make electric cars when most people drive internal combustion engines?
How are those open source? Or are they open source but not open to third party contributions? Or does development not take place on github? Just curious since if the code isn't public I'm curious how it's considered open source.
When we can't afford to keep building a feature, we release it as open source and reintegrate it eventually.
If you're commiting to private repos like that, then you're not contributing to open source.
Sure, you're programming, and contributing to projects that others use, and yes, your github profile doesn't show that. But it correctly shows your level of open source contributions.
Instead, please spend that time improving things for your users.
My dissertation project is in a Github private repository, yet it looks like I abandoned Github - at least to the few people who seem interested in what I do.
Combine this with the use of StackOverflow Careers and Github Jobs, I might as well have died as far as potential employers are concerned.
It was advised in my first year by a few tutors to just keep it in a private repo until hand-in. I'm fine with that, in fact, just publically listed a dodgy encryption algorithm I wrote for a class!
For me, in 2013, I made close to 800 commits to private repos. When I'm logged in, I can see the activity in the "Your Contributions" section of my private profile. Last year, I also switched employers and because I don't have any public projects I contributed to, my profile looks barren. However, that's far from the truth.
It would be nice if Github would allow me a setting to display just the commit activity, but not link to the private repos. I wouldn't be surprised if this is far off.
For those that would say "you should be contributing to more OS projects then", just remember that there are some of us who can't code 14 hours a day (anymore). We have families and/or lives out side of coding. This doesn't make our effort any less valuable than those that do it for the public. We just have a different set of constraints and responsibilities.
I would say the companies you look at work in have seriously flawed hiring practices. They would not hired our best engineers, cause they do not have open source github contributions. They code plenty for work through.
If Github started selling insurance, there's a good chance they would have a president for Github Code and a president for Github Insurance. They wouldn't have two CEO's, though.
How would you characterize the COO then?
Think about Facebook: Zuckerberg sets direction/vision, and Sandberg executes against that. (I'm sure it's not as clear-cut in reality, but you get the idea.)
In some larger companies, there are multiple presidents with responsibility for their own divisions, who all report up to the CEO.
Because the CEO represents the shareholders, legally his or her main job is to protect the interests of the shareholders. For a public company, the CEO is the one sweating the most about the stock price; for a private company, the CEO is usually responsible for raising investment and driving the financial structure of the company. If someone is a potential investor or acquirer, they will be working with the CEO. Because they're selling the vision of why the company is a good long-term investment, the CEO tends to be the voice of the long term strategy.
The president may still have some of those responsibilities, but in most cases is less directly involved in fund-raising and more focused on the day-to-day operations.
That said, there are a number of other responsibilities around direction, operations, hiring, etc that can be split between the president and CEO.
While the CEO is not (absent other roles) a representative of the shareholders (as you pointed out), there is a legal duty of loyalty to act in the best interest of the shareholders.
So while not a representative of the shareholders, the CEO is always responsible for representing the interests of the shareholders.
As you stated, those goals aren't necessarily related to the stock price or maximizing revenue. However, if the interest of the shareholders is something other than those goals, the CEO still has a legal fiduciary responsibility to act as a representative of the shareholder interests that do exist.
1. The President is being groomed for the CEO position once the "real" CEO leaves (such as Tim Cook).
2. One of the two needs to give up their position, but isn't because either nobody wants to force them out or they're too powerful to be forced out.
3. The company is so huge, the CEO needs to delegate some of their authority.
My money's on #2. Tom Preston-Warner clearly doesn't need training to be the CEO, and github clearly isn't big enough to need separate CEO and president roles.
I can envision it too. Looks something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
1. http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/09/07/githubs-new-offi...
(As an aside, the idea behind the Oval Office as a visitor's reception is to turn the notion on its head a little bit. We've all been to companies where the reception area is just an afterthought, and you're stuck awkwardly standing in the middle of an open floor, not knowing what to do next. Our Oval is a tongue-in-cheek jab at that, and an attempt to make things a little more, well, interesting while you're waiting for a GitHubber to meet you.)
GitHub turns that on its head. Haley sits at the president's desk and is entrusted with people's first experience with GitHub's HQ. She's an important part of our culture. It's an big responsibility and a position deserving respect (as all positions are).
* Time estimation.
* GRANTT charts.
Serious answer: Issues are not--to my knowledge--a software estimation tool. I have worked for decades in estimation-oriented development environments, and in my (anecdotal) experience, it is a mistake to use the same tool for both estimation and delivery.
It is seductive for them to be the same thing, as you can feed actual times back into your project, but the conclusion I've drawn is that the estimate reflects a kind of "interface" visible to the outside world, while the issues reflect an "implementation" visible to the team.
When they are the same thing, you end up doing a lot of work fiddling with the estimate to keep it congruent with the internal tasks, even when that congruence is not relevant to the delivery date(s).
I realize that this is heterodoxy.
#jokesAreLikeFrogs
I hope they are very careful about adding features and would rather see them focus on trimming less useful features.
I hope they use a "fork the CEO role" button.
The title is a formality, their organization is notoriously flat and being co-founders they probably don't make major initiatives without the other's approval anyways. If anything they're probably just swapping "who sits in the spotlight for this year".
And when you head a tech-oriented company, the difference between CTO and CEO is probably negligible anyways.
Obviously some companies with both a CEO and a President can be amazingly successful [2], but tend to still be clear about who is ultimately in charge. It's not that I doubt Tom and Chris share a vision for github and clearly communicate and execute on that vision together; I just wonder when and how that model might hit its limits.
<div id="something-to-complain-about"Personally I see no point in using GIFs, unless on a site which allows embedding images, but not videos. On a site which you control, video tag works just fine.
- Deal with cross browser inconsistencies with html5 video.
- Create a poster image for the video
- Save the video format in mp4, ogg, webm
- Save out and build flash alternative for older browsers
...
...
- Realize that a gif probably would have been the best option for this post.
- ignore older browsers (today practically all browsers support the video tag, caring about older browsers in this context is like caring about IE6, i.e. it's bad).
- stick with a compromise solution (H.264, yeah that's sad, but until Daala will come this mess will remain, but now Firefox already supports H.264 easily, so it's not a problem anymore). If the space allows it, I wouldn't mind encoding in both WebM and MP4, just for the sake of supporting free formats.