I'd be really curious to read more about how the Github team's intuition around polyglot programming and "Right Tool for the Job" rhetoric changed over time. I feel like I read a blog post about this one or two years ago but I can't remember which team member wrote it :)
GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team
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Re: GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team
#12I'd be really curious to read more about how the Github team's intuition around polyglot programming and "Right Tool for the Job" rhetoric changed over time. I feel like I read a blog post about this one or two years ago but I can't remember which team member wrote it :)
Re: GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team
#13> A month ago I was working from a cabin in the woods in Wisconsin.
OT, but has anyone else tried this? I've often fantasized about working while embedded in a beautiful nature setting, but I imagine it's tough to find good internet in such a place. I'm in California ... any recommendations?
I've also thought of copying Antony Garret Lisi's 'science hostel' idea [1] but for coders / entrepreneurs :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi#Science_ho...
Re: GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team
#14> A month ago I was working from a cabin in the woods in Wisconsin. OT, but has anyone else tried this? I've often fantasized about working while embedded in a beautiful nature setting, but I imagine it's tough to find good internet in such a place. I'm in California ... any recommendations? I've also thought of copying Antony Garret Lisi's 'science hostel' idea [1] but for coders / entrepreneurs :) [1]: https://en.w…
/r/digitalnomad
Re: GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team
#15My favorite quote:
"GitHub’s largely officeless workplace — about 60 percent of its employees work remotely, using a powerful homemade chatbot, called Hubot, to collaborate."
It's really cool to work wherever you like without lose the team's efficient.
Re: GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team
#16> For a long time, very key bits of our infrastructure were strung together with Shell scripts and simple scripting, and it’s surprisingly effective and still works really very well for us.
Key bits of the world's infrastructure still run on a bunch of flimsy shell scripts that seem like they'd break all the time but don't. If a computer program works reliably at all it will probably work reliably indefinitely, assuming the environment it lives in does not change substantially.
We probably all trust our lives to high end routers and medical equipment powered by shell scripts (or worse) every day. The code would scare you but, surprisingly, it will probably never fail you.
Re: GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team
#17My favorite quote: this is actually a really pragmatic set of hackers that just hack on Ruby, hack on C and spend their time working on more interesting things using a more stable stack, rather than chasing after the latest and shiny tech.
Also worth noting that within their stack, they don't chase the newest versions. Until about a year ago, they were running Rails 2.3, when they upgraded to Rails 3.0:
http://shayfrendt.com/posts/upgrading-github-to-rails-3-with...
Re: GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team
#18> A month ago I was working from a cabin in the woods in Wisconsin. OT, but has anyone else tried this? I've often fantasized about working while embedded in a beautiful nature setting, but I imagine it's tough to find good internet in such a place. I'm in California ... any recommendations? I've also thought of copying Antony Garret Lisi's 'science hostel' idea [1] but for coders / entrepreneurs :) [1]: https://en.w…
I bought an RV and did this for a while. It was fun but I wasn't any more productive. In the past I also tried moving to a remote beach resort town in Australia with a cofounder. It was fun and beautiful but again no more productive than we were back home.
Re: GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team
#19I wonder what they use for a chat system? Slack? IRC? Jabber? Their own app suite?
Re: GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team
#20How do you go from DB Admin to Director of Technology in 2 years!? That's pretty impressive.
Thank you. It was a mix on working on impactful stuff https://github.com/blog/1880-making-mysql-better-at-github, making an effort to work on more general issues like availability, having a culture that allowed me to be ambitious, and solid mentorship from our CTO.