
Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010. - mojombo
Two days ago I had the pleasure of speaking at Startup School. Never before have I see such a high concentration of smart ambitious people in one place.<p>I've posted a followup on my blog at http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happiness.html that covers some of the ideas I introduced in more detail.<p>Since I only had about 25 minutes for the talk and 5 minutes for questions, I wanted to make myself available for additional questions. So today I'll be answering any questions you have here on Hacker News.<p>Ask away!
======
alok-g
Working fulltime for Powerset, how did you avert any potential IP issues with
Powerset? Employee contracts for just about any big tech company includes
provisions that automatically makes all types of IP (including inventions and
copyrights) developed by the employee belong to the company. This applies even
if the work is done completely on the sides and outside work hours.

California specifically has laws that allow employees to claim inventions of
their own but still under terms that are more favorable to the employer (I can
supply details). There's no help for copyrightable works, which would include
software, or even a written plan for developing this software.

I certainly have this issue currently preventing me from doing any work to
bootstrap while I am still employed. Most people I spoke to at SUS2010 who are
working on side projects are completely unaware of the issue. Some are
ignoring it thinking that it must somehow work out.

On the other hand, every successful founder I spoke to, either did not have
this issue (founded right after school, etc.), or did not do any work before
quitting (which they did either before or after securing funding).

~~~
kneath
ProTip: Just because someone puts a form in front of you doesn't mean you have
to sign it :)

That form (release of inventions) scared me the first time I saw it (agency
job) and I asked if I could just not sign it — they said that was fine. It's
amazing how far you can get in life by just asking questions.

~~~
alok-g
I did not know this more than half-a-decade earlier. I had even added the
stuff I want to work on as an exception clause in the form. But it turns out
that those apply only to (A) inventions/patents type of IP, and (B) work done
prior to signing the form.

Reading the form that I signed, doing extensive online research, and then
reading the form again, I found that the form has been very carefully crafted
to take care of every type of IP possible and yet without violating any laws
including those of California.

In my case at least, I am skeptical that not signing the form would have
worked. But may be. I'll certainly be smarter next time around!

------
PStamatiou
Talk about how you started getting out into the community and connecting with
real users. IE - how you got Github drinkups off the ground. As a company with
a small but growing number of happy developers around our platform
(notifo.com), we'd love to attempt something similar.

We are thinking about doing things like API contests to help grow the
community as well as occasional meetups.

unrelated- whose idea was it to give away pappy van winkel? I recall some old
contest you guys ran. Did that contest fare well.. how'd you publicize it?
Sorry for all the questions!

~~~
tlrobinson
Indeed. GitHub has the mindshare to get a critical mass of people to their
drinkups, but a lot of startups don't. But if those startups were to combine
forces they might...

Proposal: GitHub used to do their San Francisco drinkup bi-weekly, now it's
monthly. How about a bunch of smaller (popularity-wise) startups (or any
project with a community) in SF fill in that gap?

This would also facilitate the "cross-polination" that GitHub drinkups achieve
by bringing together different groups of people.

Cappuccino already has it's weekly "CPCoder Night" on Wednesdays but that's
more sitting a cafe hacking and helping each other out with technical
problems. I'd be happy to help organize something like I described above if
people are interested (feel free to email me at the address in my profile if
you're interested)

~~~
PStamatiou
280 North + Notifo + X + Y + Z Drinkups.. I like it. Though 280 could probably
pull off their own drinkup ;)

If there is enough interest in this from other local startups, I'll setup some
google group where we can discuss logistics/planning.

~~~
tlrobinson
We need a name. "Startups" + "drinks" = DRINKUP!

~~~
loluyede
you startuppers drink a lot :-P Joking, wish I was in SF ;-)

~~~
tlrobinson
Well, there's no reason you can't have the same kind of event in other cities.
In fact this model of batching a bunch of startups/projects together would be
perfect for areas with a lower density of startups...

------
ivankirigin
The smartest people I know want to do their own startups. It is getting
easier, so more people are doing it. How do you hire in the face of this
issue?

~~~
mojombo
You do it by building a company so compelling that those people would rather
join your company than start their own. You do this by optimizing for
happiness and creating a culture that can't be ignored.

~~~
ben_hall
Are you recruiting at the moment? I couldn't see anything on github jobs...

~~~
mojombo
Not currently. We usually approach specific people we want to hire and pitch
them on coming to work for us.

------
bobf
If you weren't at SUS2010 and are going to only watch a few of the talks, I
would highly recommend Tom's talk (as well as Brian Chesky's). He was
extremely engaging, and the content (bootstrapping - "Optimizing for happiness
instead of money") was great.

Tom -- Across the industry, figures such as 1% paid accounts seem to be
typically mentioned. What sort of ratio do you see on Github between paid/free
accounts? Do you see any difference in that ratio internationally vs.
domestically?

~~~
mojombo
It's higher than one percent, but we don't publicize those numbers. It's hard
to compute the difference in ratio internationally vs. domestically because we
only have the optional user specified location field to go off of.

~~~
bobf
Any anecdotal guesses from your drinkup experiences? Perhaps reworded, do you
feel people are more or less willing to pay for SaaS
domestically/internationally?

~~~
mojombo
Yes, I've met all kinds of people while travelling that pay for GitHub
accounts.

I'm always surprised at how many people have heard of GitHub in other
countries. I think it shows how successful virality can be. We plant the seeds
of GitHub usage in foreign countries through conference talks and drinkups,
and the people that attend become patient zeros for the spread of Git/GitHub
in those locales.

------
paulca
Err the Blog had about 10,000 readers when GitHub launched and Chris and PJ
already had a ton of users of their popular Rails plugins.

This was a huge audience to launch to. What advice would you give to people
who want to dive in to their own company without trying to build up such a
huge following before hand?

Is it madness to try to bootstrap without establishing an audience beforehand?

~~~
mojombo
I started Gravatar when I knew nobody and nobody knew me. It grew quite
rapidly. The single most important lesson you can learn from GitHub and
Gravatar is that virality and community can help turn any good idea into a
huge success. Make something that people can use to show others how great they
are. Kathy Sierra talks a lot about this concept. People love interacting with
other people. Figure out how to make that work for your idea.

------
Lewisham
GitHub does a lot of amazing work, and you guys are all fabulous coders.
However, when I've spoken to colleagues in person, there's a definite feeling
that GitHub have a tendency to have some Not-Invented-Here syndrome: see CI
Joe when Hudson was already mature and widely used. It seems like a lot of
brain-cycles could have been saved and put elsewhere.

Do you think that's a fair comment? Is it something you think is necessarily
negative?

~~~
mojombo
We don't put up with any bullshit. If the existing software out there
displeases us, no matter how mature it is, we'll be tempted to build something
better. This is how progress is made. It's possible that we're duplicating
effort somewhere, but we all cherish the act of creation, and if we think we
can improve upon the situation, we will. Sometimes just for the sheer joy of
it.

I'd wager that pretty much everything you use today was considered an act of
NIH by someone at some point in the past.

~~~
cullenking
Along these lines, thanks for pushing Unicorn (I know you didn't develop it in
house, but it was obscure until you used it).

~~~
mojombo
I think Chris was the primary one behind that decision, but I agree. Unicorn
kicks ass!

~~~
cullenking
Meant GitHub in general. Can't beat simplistic zero downtime rolling deploys!

------
busterbenson
Hi Tom - I saw your talk (streamed) from Startup School, loved it, and also
read Drive over the weekend. I'm currently strongly considering bootstrappping
my new company (healthmonth.com) similarly to how you've done.

Are you willing to share a bit more detail about the timeline of the first
year when you went from 2 people to ? people... when you hired, how much you
spent on salaries versus how much you were making in revenue (exact numbers
not required), and how certain you were that revenue would continue to grow at
the pace required to support your staff.

Also, what were the "other means" by which you supported yourself until GitHub
was able to support you? Your jobs? Or something else?

~~~
mojombo
It took three months to go from inception to private beta. We used an invite
only system to introduce artificial scarcity and drive buzz on Twitter (each
new signup got five invites to use). After six months we launched to the
public and started charging for private repos. Because we had such a great
beta period, we converted a large number of users that day and were making
money immediately! For the next several months we put every dollar that we
made into the company bank account and let it accrue.

One year after inception I was faced with a choice: take a full time position
at Microsoft (Powerset had been acquired) or quit and go full time at GitHub.
We were making enough money at GitHub to pay low salaries for the three
cofounders and we decided to Hire Scott Chacon at the same time. So we went
from zero to four full time salaries in one day, a year after starting it on
the side.

Over the next six months we incrementally raised salaries for everyone as we
hit specific revenue goals. So about 18 months after inception we were making
decent salaries. We also hired Tekkub to do full time tech support in this
timeframe. Our next hire was Melissa, our office manager a few months later.

As far as revenue at these milestones, we were always profitable. We only
hired when we had the money to do so. For the first 18 months we didn't carry
much balance in the bank account. We used it to hire great people.

Being a subscription service means that recurring revenue is extremely
predictable. We've never had a month where revenue has dropped, and we can
predict the increase in monthly revenue quite accurately as well. Growth has
been surprisingly smooth (not spikey).

We now make money from GitHub.com, GitHub FI, Training, the Job Board, and
merchandise.

~~~
Lewisham
Who are your customers for GitHub FI? It seems that Github is SaaS done
really, excellently right: I can have private repos up and running for a cheap
cost in minutes. Is FI just for people who are very protective about who has
access to their source code, or is it filling some other niche that SaaS can't
handle?

~~~
holman
There are a couple of different "types" of customers. Some, like you said, are
just concerned about their code. Some are interested in control (meaning they
control their backup policies, uptime, redundancy, etc.). Some want better
integration (we support LDAP and CAS authentication, let you plug directly
into various git hooks, that sort of thing).

Hosted plans work great for a bunch of companies, and self-hosted installs
work great for a bunch of companies. Might as well help out both. :)

------
waxman
What are your thoughts on non-technical founders (or early employees) at tech
start-ups (like GitHub)?

Are there any non-technical people at GH? Would you consider hiring any? Why
or why not?

(Full disclosure: I'm an engineer just coming off of a bad experience with a
'business' co-founder)

~~~
mojombo
I don't have any experience with non-technical cofounders, but I don't think
that I'd start an internet company with one unless they were the absolutely
most well connected, proven person that was going to be instrumental in
getting us into a difficult to enter industry.

We only have one non-technical employee, our office manager Melissa. She's
absolutely essential to the team. We have no plans to hire other non-technical
people right now, but that doesn't mean that we won't in the future. Who we
hire depends on what skills we need.

------
swanson
When are new Github tshirts coming?

What are your thoughts on the BitBucket/Atlassian deal?

Are there any new features coming soon that you can give us a sneak peek at?
I'd personally like to see some kind of "looking for contributors" interface
(similiar to OpenHatch), maybe even with recommended projects based on my
repos or the repos I have watched in the past.

~~~
mojombo
The new shipment of Fork You shirts will arrive at our office today. We will
get the inventory online right away!

The BitBucket/Atlassian deal is interesting. Especially the price points they
think they need to establish in order to make their offering attractive. I
really don't think about it too much, I'm too busy making GitHub the best
place to collaborate on code!

We don't talk about planned features. We find that if you talk about what
you're GOING to do, then people will just be angry that it's not finished yet.
If you wait until you're done, then people will go crazy over the shiny new
feature. Apple knows how this works. Judge for yourself which approach you
think works better. =)

------
jonursenbach
We're currently using Redmine to keep track of tickets, but it's a bit of a
pain having to manage it separately from our code in GH. Are you guys planning
on overhauling your issues system to be as slick as everything else you offer?

~~~
mojombo
I can neither confirm nor deny that we're working on kickass improvements to
GitHub Issues.

------
vanstee
Are you guys hiring? Also, what other startups do you think are on the same
level of awesome as GitHub?

~~~
mojombo
We hire very slowly and very carefully. And we draw from our personal network
first. The best way to get hired by GitHub is to be in San Francisco, come to
the Drinkups, write awesome open source code or make insanely beautiful
designs, and be a genuinely interesting and hard working person.

As for other startups, I don't really know firsthand the culture of many of
them, but I do know the founders of CrowdFlower and they're amazing. And
they're hiring. Go check them out.

------
j_baker
Why did you choose git instead of hg, bzr, fossil, etc?

Also, what do you see as the future of git? Where is git going?

~~~
mojombo
Git was the first distributed version control system that I spent any time
with. It turned out that it was also the most elegant in construction and the
most powerful in ability.

I think the future of Git is to become the technology on which really amazing,
usable versioning and collaboration is built. Git the technology should be
irrelevant to the end user. Git/GitHub the experience should be the best in
the world. At least, that's the direction we intend to take it.

------
javery
One thing I love about GitHub is that you embrace NIH in a good way - lots of
cool technology has come out of GitHub because you were unhappy with the
current solutions out there. What else have you cooked up internally that you
might release to the world one day?

~~~
mojombo
We have an awesome tool we call Haystack that we use to collect, categorize,
and search exceptions and other notices. It uses MongoDB capped collections to
keep the number of stored entries to a manageable level. "Needles" are simple
JSON hashes and the views are customizable with Mustache. Exceptions can be
rolled up based on a custom value provided by the producer. For instance, we
roll up exceptions by filename and line number of origin. We use the hell out
of it.

There are other projects, but nothing else that I'm able to talk about at the
moment.

~~~
cmelbye
Do you think Haystack will ever be released to the public? If not, could you
guys post a blog post on the GitHub blog or one of your personal blogs with
more details? It sounds very interesting.

~~~
mojombo
It's hard to say. We don't have a lot of extra bandwidth to put towards
properly releasing these kinds of side projects. I'd love to get it into the
public's hands someday though.

------
csallen
How do you decide what features to add or not add to Github? How much
thinking, discussion, planning, design, research, etc go into each feature
before coding begins?

~~~
mojombo
We look for features that we want to use ourselves. It's usually quite
apparent what areas of the site need some love or where entire features are
missing. The things that get implemented are the things that are important
enough for someone on the team to actually sit down and start working on. If
you want a feature badly enough, you'll go build it. It turns out that this is
a great filter for what is worthwhile.

Some features (like Pull Requests 2.0) spend many months in development before
they're launched. PRs took about 8 months of off and on work before they were
ready. Pressure from other team members will often serve as a catalyst for the
implementors to finish what they started.

More strategic decisions often bubble up to the founders and we'll make a
final decision on whether we need to hire additional people to make things
happen faster.

------
s_n
In your blog post ([http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-
sel...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-selling-
gravatar-to-automattic.html)), you say "As it’s become one of my favorite
parables, I’ll save the details of how I came up with the idea for Gravatar
for a future post."

When will that post happen? :-)

~~~
mojombo
Oh, good point, I still need to write that. I'll put it on the list!

------
quizbiz
Can you share details about some critical decisions you made that led to the
success of Github?

~~~
mojombo
Making the user the namespace for code instead of the project.

Growing slowly and embracing the constraints of a limited budget in the early
days.

Hiring only the absolute best people that we could find. Hiring people that we
knew through their code. Making sure they were good cultural fits.

Not getting an office until two years after we started GitHub. Campfire was
our office in the meantime and that let us put what money we did have into
hiring the best people.

Always thinking for ourselves.

------
brown9-2
Any decisions in these past 3 years you regret?

~~~
mojombo
Not really. Any mistakes we made were learning experiences and we fixed them.
The only regrettable decisions are those that you let control you.

------
julien
DO you see Github as an "open web" player? What would you think if someone
built tools to federate Github and Gitorious, or unfuddle? Would you help
them?

~~~
mojombo
I want all of the data on GitHub to be open. We recently made our wiki system
Git-backed so that users could get their data. I want to do the same for
Issues and comments and everything else. These things take time.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "federate Github and Gitorious, or
unfuddle".

~~~
julien
Well, basically, I could push to either of those and see my code pulled by
others... with some kind of callback mechanism.

Have you considered implementing PubSubHubbub? It's a great way to make all
feeds open. [In my case, it would allow me to make a status.net instance that
publishes my GH activities, or the commits on the repos that I 'own']

~~~
pjscott
GitHub has feeds for most everything, and you can subscribe to them in
realtime via PubSubHubbub using their hub:

<http://github.superfeedr.com/>

------
jcnnghm
How has being a founder of such a successful service affected your personal
life?

~~~
mojombo
Not really that much. More people recognize me and say hello at tech events. I
get invited to more conferences and get to travel a lot more than I ever have
before. I can easily get meetings with influential people in the industry and
VCs buy me dinner from time to time.

Other than that, I still do all the same things I did before, hang out with my
wife and friends, and my favorite meal is still tater tots and a vegetarian
spicy sausage with sauerkraut and yellow mustard.

------
busterbenson
To what extent to you implement ROWE: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE>

It sounds like you have a few of these qualities... choosing your work hours,
for example... but what about measuring results. Do you have any specific tips
on how to measure results without getting too confused or attached to the a
new incorrect metric?

~~~
mojombo
We implement some of the concepts of ROWE, but we don't really measure results
in any quantifiable way. We hire the best, most driven people we can and give
them the means to produce awesome things. So far so good!

~~~
busterbenson
That seems to be the secret trick here, it's more about creating autonomy and
encouraging mastery and purpose than about actually measuring anything, or
managing anything. And if it works, it's gotta be a nice place to be. Congrats
on building an amazing company.

~~~
mojombo
Yeah, that's exactly right. Thanks!

------
patio11
What does a typical workday look like for you?

~~~
mojombo
Since we don't have set work hours, there's a lot of variety to my daily
routine. If I'm in SF, I'll usually get out of bed around 9am, roll over to my
desk and deal with email and catch up on tech news. I'll head into the office
around 11am and do any of a million different things there. Between 6pm and
8pm I'll think about heading home. Maybe a few of us will hit a bar first or
grab dinner at a close restaurant. Right now it's 10:15pm and I'm coordinating
with vendors via email and talking with some of the GitHub guys in Campfire.

It's rare that a day will go by that I don't work on GitHub in some fashion. I
like to get out into nature on weekends to refresh my creative energy and get
some exercise, but I'll still be checking email and maybe writing some code or
jotting down ideas I had on the ride.

------
bosky101
Any interesting conversation with Linus, you could share with us?

~~~
mojombo
We actually haven't talked to Linus. He only takes part in discussions around
Git when he notices something wrong. The model that the Linux kernel uses for
contributions is pretty well set in stone (and email) and so it's likely that
GitHub doesn't really offer him, personally, much benefit. We do, however,
speak regularly with the top core Git maintainers and have a good relationship
with them.

------
icco
You recommended six good books on founding companies. Would you recommend any
technical books or works of fiction?

~~~
mojombo
Code Complete is a must read for professional developers.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is always good for a mind-bending
read. All of HP Lovecraft's work is excellent. Anything by Arthur C Clarke or
Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury. All of Ayn Rand's stuff (the philosophy is
flawed, but the plots and writing are something to behold).

------
chegra
Well, let me just ask. I was trying to find how much Gravatar was purchased
for by Automatic.

~~~
mojombo
Sorry, I'm contractually unable to divulge that amount.

~~~
chegra
Figured as much but thx. Oh, did you have a previous blog that you talked
about design, if so could I have the link?

~~~
mojombo
I had one years and years ago, but it's long gone now. Sorry!

------
GVRV
If I'm not wrong, you were consulting and working on GitHub at the same time -
how did you manage getting both things done? Time, money management, etc?

I've often heard that if you can't get co-founders on board, it often means
your startup idea is not good enough - but given the mountains of debt we
students graduate with, it's often difficult to convince people to start up.
How did you find your co-founders? What are your thoughts on single founder
startups?

You've said that Gravatar was especially hard to run in the last year, how do
you know when to give up? From what I've read GitHub was scratching your own
itch, but how do you know what to work on? How do you personally judge ideas?

Thanks!

~~~
mojombo
I was actually working fulltime at Powerset and doing GitHub on the side. I
spent a lot of time coding, but it's what I love. Working on GitHub was how I
expressed the creativity that I couldn't when I was doing tool support at
Powerset. It was something I could call my own, and it was a way to unwind
after a long day in meetings. Money wasn't a problem. I was getting a good
salary at Powerset.

I found my cofounders via local Ruby meetups. I was by myself when I was doing
Gravatar and it sucked. Having two cofounders with GitHub has been one of the
best decisions I've ever made. They provided additional manpower in the early
days when velocity of development matters most, and they acted as a safeguard
against bad decisions. It's extremely motivating to have other people that are
depending on you to produce great work. I would highly recommend against
single founder startups for all of these reasons and a thousand more.

Gravatar did become hard to run towards the end. I was spending a few hundred
dollars a month on servers and there was no good way to make money with it. It
seemed a bit hopeless. I never gave up though. I put in the hours to make it
work and eventually sold it to Automattic. To me, that was a success. I
created something of value and sold it to someone that had the resources to
take it to the next level.

It's hard to explain how I judge my startup ideas. It's a lot of intuition
based on years of experience with the internet and with a lot of examples of
things that I love and ton of examples of things that I hate. All this adds up
to a feeling that something will work out. Once I have that feeling about an
idea, I jump in 100%.

------
larrywright
I'm a little late on this, but hopefully you're still lurking :)

You guys use a lot of different technologies to power Github. What are the
technologies that have you the most excited these days? Are there any you
think are over-hyped?

------
natep
Are you planning to release svn write-support in any fashion at any point in
the future? git has git-cvsserver, and could really use a git-svnserver.

Also, many of the casual svn users I talk to are on Windows using TortoiseSVN.
Git's Windows support has grown in leaps and bounds in recent months, but it's
still not quite 100% (seems the entire git mailing list uses linux/osx,
TortoiseGit isn't as clean/solid as TortoiseSVN, and it's documentation is in
broken english). Do you see this as an area GitHub needs to tackle in order to
get more Git adoption, and if so, what are you doing about it?

~~~
mojombo
We already do support writing via the SVN bridge:
<http://github.com/blog/644-subversion-write-support>

Windows support for Git is ok, but it could be a lot better. We absolutely
intend to create first class Git/GitHub experiences on every platform.

~~~
natep
Right, GitHub has it, but Git doesn't, so companies that can't host their code
off-site (for legal or other reasons) won't have this feature.

------
qrush
When are we going to see an API for pulls, organizations, and commit comments?

~~~
mojombo
Soon, I hope. =)

------
jonpaul
I love GitHub. Can you give the HN community a sense of your monthly revenue?

~~~
mojombo
It's not a figure that we publicize, but let's just say it's enough to support
thirteen well paid employees, a San Francisco office, 34 physical machines at
Rackspace, and plenty left over to put in the bank account.

------
westoque
I read a post regarding you guys following some of the tips from the book
"Getting Real." How greatly did it influence you guys in running the company?
What would you have done otherwise?

~~~
mojombo
There is some great advice in Getting Real, but I don't remember being
particularly influenced by it. I was more influenced by Ricardo Semler's book
Maverick. And by wanting to build a company that I myself would want to work
for, regardless of anything anyone else has to say. That has driven nearly
every decision.

------
mrjbq7
Hi Tom,

I've been waiting two months for a minor ticket (#8991) to get pushed to
production. I totally understand development priorities, and especially the
challenge of high-volume production environments.

I've heard the development environment of Github described as extremely agile:
being driven by individual desires rather than being directed by management,
as is typical of a top-down organization.

My question is this:

Does that impact your support decisions? Or, am I seeing an effect from your
recent success and growth, being unable to keep up with support requests?

Thanks!

~~~
mojombo
This ticket looks to have gotten quite a bit of attention, but the Pygments
upgrade seems to have fallen through the cracks. I'm working to get it back on
track. We do our best to handle every support ticket, but low priority tickets
can sometimes take a while to be properly addressed. Sorry about that!

~~~
mrjbq7
Thanks for the quick reply and action!

------
pjdavis
How essential to your success do you feel the freemium model was?

~~~
mojombo
I don't know that I'd classify us as a traditional freemium offering. The only
difference between the free and paid accounts is privacy. In any case, this
has worked out extremely well for us. In exchange for free access to the site
for open source we get a tremendous amount of exposure. In essence we are
trading free accounts for free advertising. I think this approach has been
critical to the rate of our growth, both for free and paid accounts.

Virality couples well with certain types of freemium models, as long as you're
getting significant exposure from the free accounts to make the cost
worthwhile.

------
r11t
In what ways have you found aspiring hackers participating in open source
projects use Github to become competent hackers?

Also, thanks for the very inspiring talk at Startup School.

~~~
mojombo
Reading code is one of the best ways to become a better programmer. You can
learn so much so quickly by trying to understand how other people you admire
solve problems in code. Making it easy to find, follow, and read code is what
GitHub is all about.

In the future, participating in open source will be the best way to land a
great job. When employers see that you have a demonstrable ability to code and
work well in a team, you have a MUCH more likely chance of getting that
interview and impressing the right people at that company you'd kill to work
for.

------
kenneth_reitz
GitHub's fandom is impressive considering how picky and opinionated developers
are. How did you find an agnosticity balance that made such a diverse group of
developers so happy?

I'm curious if the answer is being selective in features. You guys had a Gem
builder for a while. Was it closed to help foster that idea that GitHub wasn't
only a Ruby community site? And, did you consider creating similar tools for
other languages?

~~~
mojombo
I think by building it for ourselves, we really built something that everyone
could appreciate. Not tying it too much to any one language, and encouraging
projects from other languages to get on board went a long way to making it
feel language agnostic.

We discontinued the gem builder because it was causing confusion in the gem
ecosystem and we were unable to build all gems (e.g. those with C extensions
or that needed signing). It was a fine experiment, but it didn't end up being
the right thing to do.

Those kinds of build tools make more sense to be developed outside of GitHub
and hooked in via the API or webhook system.

------
staunch
Do Github employees get equity?

~~~
mojombo
Yes. Our equity offers are quite generous. Invested employees are motivated
employees. Ownership is a huge factor in job satisfaction.

------
cgbystrom
You host a lot of open-source projects and GitHub itself is even built on it.

What would you say is the best way to monetize your open-source product?

~~~
mojombo
Well, what we've done seems to be working pretty well. Have an open source
tool (or leverage someone else's) and then sell additional hosted or
installable tools that expand the power of the underlying tool.

I know of a lot of places that do well with providing support and consulting
for their open source offerings, but that doesn't scale as well as something
that you can charge for on a recurring basis and that doesn't derive directly
from butts in seats.

------
vborja
Have you thought about having people working for GitHub on other countries -
telecommuting -, I mean, there are really _smart_ guys all over the world,
that's one of the lessons I've learned from opensource, so being GH mostly
driven and built by opensource hackers, any chance GH will be open for that
kind of work?.

~~~
mojombo
Our lead sysadmin is in Australia and we have a support person in Greece. So
yes, we're open to it!

------
superjared
What's the status of BERT-RPC and its usage at GitHub? Have you noticed any
drawbacks to it since you first created it?

~~~
mojombo
We still use BERT-RPC for all communications between the Rails app and the
backend file servers to transfer information about Git repos. It's been
working great but there are some improvements I'd like to build into a BERT-
RPC 2.0 spec (async messaging ids for one). Overall it's been really good for
what we use it for.

------
frederickcook
You mentioned below that all employees get equity, but it also sounds like you
guys are quite happy with the growth you're having and are in it for the long-
haul. (Incorrect?)

Do you expect to ever have a liquidity event (sell the company), or is there
some proportionate profit-sharing plan with the equity?

~~~
mojombo
Right now we're focused on building the best team and making the best product
we can. If this should lead to an attractive acquisition offer at some point
in the future then we will surely consider it as a company and weight the
benefits and drawbacks. We don't currently have a profit-sharing plan in
place, but depending on the future direction of the company, it may be
appropriate to put one in place. All of these things are too nuanced to make
general predictions at the moment.

------
zdw
Any comments on how you (either personally or GitHub as a whole) manages the
work/life balance issues?

Any pointers for dealing with cases when the people you work with turn out not
to be "reasonable"?

(I ask because I tend to find that soft-skill management issues are where I'm
lacking in expertise)

~~~
mojombo
Not having a set work schedule allows us to work when we're most effective,
leaving more time available for taking care of personal affairs. If you want
to take Wednesday off because your Mom's in town, then that's what you do. We
all work hard enough and smart enough that I don't worry at all about our
people getting their work done. We love what we do, and that's what makes it
all work out.

So far we haven't hired anyone that has been "unreasonable." I hope that we
never do. In past jobs, I have had to deal with unreasonable people. That is
one reason I was drawn to being an entrepreneur. So I wouldn't have to do that
anymore.

------
d3bugging
How many page views do you guys get? Out of the 34 servers, how many are front
end? I want to get an idea of the # of page views per front end server your
rails app is handling.

------
sh1mmer
Fancy a beer next week?

~~~
mojombo
Absolutely. How about Nihon?

~~~
Greenisus
Nihon is awesome. Please make this a drinkup! :)

~~~
mojombo
I don't think we'd all fit!

~~~
sh1mmer
I don't think Github (or anyone really) could afford a drinkup at Nihon.

------
bkudria
How awesome are your book recommendations?

<http://astore.amazon.com/mojombo-20>

~~~
mojombo
I dunno. I think they're pretty awesome.

------
pacov
Why didnt you come to magma rails `_´ ?

Would github be willing to support an event by rails.mx next year :P

~~~
schacon
That was entirely my fault. I was supposed to speak there and host a drinkup
but I got a bit overloaded and wasn't able to make it. GitHub was a sponsor of
the conference and would like to do more in Mexico in the future. Next time
I'll actually show up!

------
benatkin
Is github a generic enough name for what you want to do, long-term?

~~~
mojombo
Perhaps not, but the name has served us well so far. Early adopters like to
identify with new technology and the name GitHub does that extremely well. I
can't predict if we'll need to change the name later on. The next few years
should make it clear wether the name is too restrictive or not.

~~~
icco
I really miss the Logical Awesome page. I wish you guys didn't rename the
company.

------
uiru
Any plan to visit Australia for RailsCamp?

~~~
mojombo
I'd love to come to Australia for RailsCamp someday. I'll keep it in mind for
next year.

------
ilovevalley
Is there any concern at all about alcoholism at Github given the success of
your drinkups? For instance, does the health plan now cover rehab and alcohol
induced cirrhosis?

~~~
mojombo
Alcohol can either be a great social lubricator or a dangerous drug depending
on how you use it. We're all friends and responsible adults at GitHub. Should
there be a problem of this nature, we will address it in a private and
personal fashion. Just like any self respecting group of people would.

------
kennethreitz
GitHub's fandom is impressive considering how picky and opinionated developers
are. How did you find an agnosticity balance that made such a diverse group of
developers so happy?

I'm curious if the answer is being selective in features. You guys had a Gem
builder for a while. Was it closed to help foster that idea that GitHub wasn't
only a Ruby community site? And, did you consider creating similar tools for
other languages?

------
moonpolysoft
What does this look like, quora?

8=============D~~~

~~~
technoweenie
No, that looks like an ascii dong.

~~~
cullenking
Coming from a guy with weenie in his name :)

