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How we keep GitHub fast

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Re: How we keep GitHub fast

#11
The mission control bar looks very familiar. Although I can't remember the name of it now, I seem to remember there being a debug bar of sorts that worked with merb/rails projects that had the same type of look. Anyone remember the name of it?

Edit:

I was thinking of FiveRuns Tune-Up toolbar.

Re: How we keep GitHub fast

#12
post #2

Should I feel bad knowing that if I were project manager, I'd feel like someone wasted valuable time making the dashboard look so pretty? Am I an idiot just for assuming that was done in house? Edit: I'm not trying to make a case either way, but I look at the color scheme, specific typography decisions, and other small things that would have taken a non-trivial amount of time to work on or think about (ie, more than…

It was done in-house. We really care about how our graphs look, because graphs represent information. It's like typography. Humans learned how to write 5000 years ago, and it took us a very long while until we mastered the art of transmitting information like that. Once we mastered it, however, we started caring about the way we present that information. For no specific reason, but we developed unique typefaces that look beautiful, different, yet transmit the same information.

Likewise, we've spent a ton of valuable time graphing and mining data from all over our stack; it's only natural that after that, we care about how we present that data. Like typography, it's hard because it's an arduous hunt for the aesthetics hidden behind information. But this hunt is what makes us human.

That's why we design beautiful graphs, just like we'd design a beautiful typeface. Not because we are GitHubbers, nor because we are designers, but because we are humans.

Life is too short to stare at ugly graphs. And yes, you should feel bad.

PS: we have no project managers at GitHub.

Re: How we keep GitHub fast

#13

The mission control bar looks very familiar. Although I can't remember the name of it now, I seem to remember there being a debug bar of sorts that worked with merb/rails projects that had the same type of look. Anyone remember the name of it? Edit: I was thinking of FiveRuns Tune-Up toolbar.

Rack Bug? https://github.com/brynary/rack-bug

Re: How we keep GitHub fast

#14
post #2

Should I feel bad knowing that if I were project manager, I'd feel like someone wasted valuable time making the dashboard look so pretty? Am I an idiot just for assuming that was done in house? Edit: I'm not trying to make a case either way, but I look at the color scheme, specific typography decisions, and other small things that would have taken a non-trivial amount of time to work on or think about (ie, more than…

[deleted]

Re: How we keep GitHub fast

#16

The mission control bar looks very familiar. Although I can't remember the name of it now, I seem to remember there being a debug bar of sorts that worked with merb/rails projects that had the same type of look. Anyone remember the name of it? Edit: I was thinking of FiveRuns Tune-Up toolbar.

Rack Bug? https://github.com/brynary/rack-bug

It was not rack bug. I'm having trouble finding it. I think the company that released it was bought or closed shortly after.

Re: How we keep GitHub fast

#17

The mission control bar looks very familiar. Although I can't remember the name of it now, I seem to remember there being a debug bar of sorts that worked with merb/rails projects that had the same type of look. Anyone remember the name of it? Edit: I was thinking of FiveRuns Tune-Up toolbar.

Rack::Bug?

Re: How we keep GitHub fast

#18
post #2

Should I feel bad knowing that if I were project manager, I'd feel like someone wasted valuable time making the dashboard look so pretty? Am I an idiot just for assuming that was done in house? Edit: I'm not trying to make a case either way, but I look at the color scheme, specific typography decisions, and other small things that would have taken a non-trivial amount of time to work on or think about (ie, more than…

"When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."

-Steve Jobs

Re: How we keep GitHub fast

#19
post #2

Should I feel bad knowing that if I were project manager, I'd feel like someone wasted valuable time making the dashboard look so pretty? Am I an idiot just for assuming that was done in house? Edit: I'm not trying to make a case either way, but I look at the color scheme, specific typography decisions, and other small things that would have taken a non-trivial amount of time to work on or think about (ie, more than…

I'd rather work for a product company like GitHub than, say, a consultancy building apps for many many clients, for reasons just like this. When you have a team working on one product that ships to millions of users, you've constructed a giant lever. As Spolsky put it, "Essentially, design adds value faster than it adds cost." [1]

Your developers' efforts create enough value (once spread across millions of customers) that you have plenty of resources left over to take care of every little detail. And some of those details may include tools that make your developers' lives easier. There is great value in well-designed abstractions like GitHub's dashboard: the human brain can only hold so many details at once. When 2 dozen little details are organized onto an internal dashboard, your developers' brains can visualize them and load them into working memory in an instant, freeing them to work on harder problems more quickly and with less detail juggling. This is very freeing and relaxing, and can even help developers see possibilities they couldn't see before.

You can't justify tools like this for every $50K Rails-App-in-a-Box, but companies like GitHub and Google certainly can.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html

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