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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.

#41

Post by mojombo »

j_baker wrote: post #28

Why did you choose git instead of hg, bzr, fossil, etc? Also, what do you see as the future of git? Where is git going?

Git was the first distributed version control system that I spent any time with. It turned out that it was also the most elegant in construction and the most powerful in ability.

I think the future of Git is to become the technology on which really amazing, usable versioning and collaboration is built. Git the technology should be irrelevant to the end user. Git/GitHub the experience should be the best in the world. At least, that's the direction we intend to take it.

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

#43

Post by mojombo »

javery wrote: post #36

One thing I love about GitHub is that you embrace NIH in a good way - lots of cool technology has come out of GitHub because you were unhappy with the current solutions out there. What else have you cooked up internally that you might release to the world one day?

We have an awesome tool we call Haystack that we use to collect, categorize, and search exceptions and other notices. It uses MongoDB capped collections to keep the number of stored entries to a manageable level. "Needles" are simple JSON hashes and the views are customizable with Mustache. Exceptions can be rolled up based on a custom value provided by the producer. For instance, we roll up exceptions by filename and line number of origin. We use the hell out of it.

There are other projects, but nothing else that I'm able to talk about at the moment.

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

#48

Post by mojombo »

Lewisham wrote: post #37

GitHub does a lot of amazing work, and you guys are all fabulous coders. However, when I've spoken to colleagues in person, there's a definite feeling that GitHub have a tendency to have some Not-Invented-Here syndrome: see CI Joe when Hudson was already mature and widely used. It seems like a lot of brain-cycles could have been saved and put elsewhere. Do you think that's a fair comment? Is it something you think is…

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 you use today was considered an act of NIH by someone at some point in the past.

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

#50

Post by s_n »

In your blog post (http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-sel...), you say "As it’s become one of my favorite parables, I’ll save the details of how I came up with the idea for Gravatar for a future post."

When will that post happen? :-)

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