
Google at GitHub - adambyrtek
https://github.com/google/
======
willnorris
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.

~~~
dustineichler
"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?

~~~
tjohns
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/>

------
icco
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.

------
rhnet
I like how people have already forked the empty repositories.

~~~
m3koval
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.

~~~
mdg
yea because google is known for their extensive ruby usage

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

------
danso
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

~~~
getsat
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.

------
munchor
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.

~~~
pjscott
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.

~~~
nupark2
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.

~~~
pjscott
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?

~~~
bad_user

         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.

------
cleverjake
is there any evidence this is legitimate?

~~~
DevX101
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.

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

<https://github.com/microsoft/>

~~~
zbowling
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>

~~~
doty
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.

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

~~~
skrebbel
Which matters!

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

~~~
Ironballs
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...

~~~
Timothee
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>

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

    
    
      "need to" -- Obi Wan

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

------
VMG
bye bye google code?

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

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

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

------
taylorbuley
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.

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

Remember: "optimizing for happiness".

~~~
kenneth_reitz
They'd never do it.

~~~
grandalf
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.

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

Maybe we just want to build an amazing company.

~~~
grandalf
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.

------
luigi
Google should acquire GitHub and let the GitHubbers run Google.

~~~
munchor
Oh no, please no! I really hope Google _never_ acquires Github.

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

~~~
Karunamon
<sarcasm intensity=100%>

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

~~~
raganwald
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.

~~~
Karunamon
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?

~~~
protomyth
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]

