
Lessons from GitHub's First Year - mojombo
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/03/29/ten-lessons-from-githubs-first-year.html
======
DavidChouinard
This is a great article. I especially like this:

 _Here’s a seemingly paradoxical piece of advice for you: Listen to your
customers, but don’t let them tell you what to do. Let me explain. Consider a
feature request such as “GitHub should let me FTP up a documentation site for
my project.” What this customer is really trying to say is “I want a simple
way to publish content related to my project,” but they’re used to what’s
already out there, and so they pose the request in terms that are familiar to
them. We could have implemented some horrible FTP based solution as requested,
but we looked deeper into the underlying question and now we allow you to
publish content by simply pushing a Git repository to your account. This meets
requirements of both functionality and elegance._

~~~
jacques_chester
Customers want a solution to their problem. To save time they will formulate
what they think is a solution and give it to you, in the hope that it will
speed up proceedings.

Think like a doctor. When the patient turns up, he or she may have a diagnosis
in mind. But it is up to you to study the symptoms and deduce the condition
_independently_ of what the patient thinks.

Remember: a potted request from a client is a symptom of some deeper problem
they wish to solve.

------
hanifvirani
This is one of the best startup articles I have read in a while. Some real
gems in there. The metaphor by Martin Fowler that the article mentions is
particularly noteworthy.

 _Imagine you’re tasked with building a computer controlled gun that can
accurately hit a target about 50 meters distant. That is the only requirement.
One way to do this is to build a complex machine that measures every possible
variable (wind, elevation, temperature, etc.) before the shot and then takes
aim and shoots. Another approach is to build a simple machine that fires
rapidly and can detect where each shot hits. It then uses this information to
adjust the aim of the next shot, quickly homing in on the target a little at a
time.

The difference between these two approaches is to realize that bullets are
cheap. By the time the former group has perfected their wind detection
instrument, you’ll have finished your simple weapon and already hit the
target._

~~~
funksta
Sounds very similar to the section of The Pragmatic Programmer on "Tracer
Bullets". There's an interview with the authors that has more discussion here
-> <http://www.artima.com/intv/tracer.html>

------
jrockway
Very interesting to hear that a bunch of git early adopters "couldn't have
done it" without Campfire. I would have pegged them in the IRC demographic.

~~~
imajes
IRC, by its nature, is very distracting. (why bother be on a network if you're
not in multiple channels?)

OT: I think convore will go the same way, unless the crew can seriously
address the SvN problem.

~~~
jrockway
Web-based chat, by its nature, is also very distracting. One click and you are
reading HN instead of your internal chat room :)

Anyway, when I worked at an all-remote company, we just ran our own IRC
server. Then all the channels were work-related. Of course, it was pretty easy
to also join other networks, which we did (but would do anyway).

------
mryall
Wow, that's a great article. Perhaps even more interesting because of Github's
growth in the three years since it was written.

I wonder if he didn't publish it because he started with the idea of
publishing _ten_ lessons. Might have been better to assign the number after
the article was written.

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d0m
"Pay attention to Twitter". I was wondering if a service is doing exactly
that? Watching twitter, "understanding" the post, and giving you a real-time
update of your service/product? If not, that might be useful!

~~~
random42
A lot. I work for one which has a similar product. Though we are much more
than just twitter, a bit less real-time, more in-depth analysis though.

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KedarMhaswade
No, 9 1/2. That 1/2 a thing is killing. Great article! When DVCS's would be
compared, GitHub would be a great plus in Git's favor.

------
deckardt
he brings up about givign people what they want and not what you ask for. that
is so hard to do. how many times have you built what you envisioned and then
went, "This is what i asked for, but it doesn't feel right." The key is
conversation, the more back and forth you have with customers, the more you
will get a feel for what they really want.

------
kragen
How have the things in the article changed since then? Does GitHub still have
no office and four employees?

~~~
regomodo
From the 1st paragraph (it might be an updated section)

"In the time since I wrote this we’ve grown from four people to twenty-six,
settled into an office, installed a kegerator, and still never taken outside
funding"

