
Scott Chacon on working at GitHub - mbrubeck
http://thegeektalk.com/interviews/scott-chacon
======
mbrubeck
_"At GitHub we don’t have a project tracker or todo list – we just all work on
whatever is most interesting to us. No standup meetings, burndown charts or
points to assign. No chickens or pigs... No managers, directors, PMs or
departments – and it’s the most agile, focused and efficient team I’ve ever
worked with."_

\---

This reminded me a lot of Steve Yegge's "Good Agile, Bad Agile" (
[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-
agile...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-
agile_27.html)):

 _"- Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on,
and they take it pretty seriously._

 _\- developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time... working
on whatever they want, as long as it's not their main project._

 _\- there aren't very many meetings. I'd say an average developer attends
perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead._

 _\- there aren't Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other
visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I've ever seen."_

~~~
dlsspy
"we just all work on whatever is most interesting to us"

Unfortunately, this will likely never be some of the things that bug their
customers the most -- such as the wiki that's been wrong since before they
launched.

~~~
mojombo
You'd be surprised how often "the things that bug [our] customers the most"
quickly become interesting to us. In this case, prioritization has played a
huge factor. Wikis have been on our minds for a long time, it just happens
that other stuff has taken precedence.

~~~
dlsspy
I appreciate the response, and continue to be a happy (paying) customer as I
do think you guys do a pretty good job of working on stuff.

A lot of really nice features can be found on github, and a lot of interesting
technology has come out of github since I've started using it (which is a few
days short of two years now).

The wikis remain pretty much trapped in time, though. I can easily imagine
what an awesome github wiki would look like, but I also understand that
migrating to it would be a huge pain.

In the meantime, I just can't use it. github pages is awesome and it's
_almost_ , but not quite a substitute. I wonder how much of the problem would
go away with gh-pages as a mob branch...

------
glymor
_probably would be running [Linux] on my Air right now except that I can’t
quite get it to. The 2nd gen Airs are not very kind to Linux at the moment_

I'm running Ubuntu on a 2nd gen Air. The big problem is getting it to boot.
The -noapic kernel option helps. Also I have a little ritual where when
turning it on I hit the power switch at the beginning grey screen then proceed
to turn it on again.

~~~
schacon
I tried that about 8 ways from Sunday - all I was getting was a black screen
of ambivalence and a dead USB port until I COPS'd it. I finally just gave up
for the time being.

------
gtani
[http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/Thoughts_on_an...](http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/Thoughts_on_an_Open_Source_Company/)

Damien Katz on couchdb

------
bugs
Aside from the corny jokes that was rather interesting interview.

