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Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

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Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#71

Post by mojombo »

cullenking wrote: post #60
mojombo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#72

Post by julien »

mojombo wrote: post #69
julien wrote: post #63

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?

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".

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']

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#74

Post by tlrobinson »

PStamatiou wrote: post #11

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…

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)

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#75

Post by PStamatiou »

tlrobinson wrote: post #74
PStamatiou wrote: post #11

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…

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…

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.

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#77

Post by 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?.

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#78

Post by bobf »

mojombo wrote: post #56
bobf wrote: post #12

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 y…

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.

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

Re: Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010.

#80

Post by malyk »

Lewisham wrote: post #51
mojombo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mon…

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?

The biggest customer I can think of is the government, though I'm sure there are others.

Think the intelligence community, military, state, fbi, etc...anyone who has a "secret" network.

There's no way CIA is going to use github private repos(1), but having a github on their various networks is possible with FI.

(1) - they might use private repos for insensitive apps, but they wouldn't be allowed to do anything with a classification on a private repo.

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