"At GitHub we don’t have a project tracker or todo list – we just all work on whatever is most interesting to us. No standup meetings, burndown charts or points to assign. No chickens or pigs... No managers, directors, PMs or departments – and it’s the most agile, focused and efficient team I’ve ever worked with."
"we just all work on whatever is most interesting to us"
Unfortunately, this will likely never be some of the things that bug their customers the most -- such as the wiki that's been wrong since before they launched.
You'd be surprised how often "the things that bug [our] customers the most" quickly become interesting to us. In this case, prioritization has played a huge factor. Wikis have been on our minds for a long time, it just happens that other stuff has taken precedence.
I appreciate the response, and continue to be a happy (paying) customer as I do think you guys do a pretty good job of working on stuff.
A lot of really nice features can be found on github, and a lot of interesting technology has come out of github since I've started using it (which is a few days short of two years now).
The wikis remain pretty much trapped in time, though. I can easily imagine what an awesome github wiki would look like, but I also understand that migrating to it would be a huge pain.
In the meantime, I just can't use it. github pages is awesome and it's almost, but not quite a substitute. I wonder how much of the problem would go away with gh-pages as a mob branch...
Remember, we are some of our biggest customers. We use GitHub every day to build GitHub - from hosting the code there, to using the wiki for planning, to issues for bug tracking, to code review — everything. Also remember that we are owners & collaborators on some of the largest OSS projects on GitHub.
What bugs you most likely bugs us ten times more. There isn't a feature on the site we don't use extensively.
Right, but they also have to incentivize people to work on the non-sexy infrastructure pieces.
I don't see how "work on whatever you want" can get the maintenance jobs done when everyone would rather be writing new code than maintaining old stuff.
I find that perfecting what some would call "non-sexy infrastructure pieces" very rewarding. In fact, it's what I spend most of my day doing! Only to me, all of our infrastructure pieces are sexy. Because I wrote and open sourced a lot of them, I want them to succeed because by doing so, they create a stable site (and I get fewer pages at 2am). If you are a software craftsman, then maintenance isn't really "maintenance." It's finding logic and design flaws and finding ways to erase those rough edges. In the end, you work towards a perfect vision of your software, just as a sculptor works toward his perfect vision of slab of marble.
Agreed! The best part about "non-sexy" code is that with a little love and attention, you get to make it sexy. :) Sure, the minute details in the back end aren't the public-facing front end that the users look at and go "wow" but there's the feeling of knowing that it's those little details that tie it all together and make it work smoothly. Improving on that can be very rewarding, indeed.
probably would be running [Linux] on my Air right now except that I can’t quite get it to. The 2nd gen Airs are not very kind to Linux at the moment
I'm running Ubuntu on a 2nd gen Air. The big problem is getting it to boot. The -noapic kernel option helps. Also I have a little ritual where when turning it on I hit the power switch at the beginning grey screen then proceed to turn it on again.
I tried that about 8 ways from Sunday - all I was getting was a black screen of ambivalence and a dead USB port until I COPS'd it. I finally just gave up for the time being.
Ouch, that sounds painful. I still use my 2+ year old MacBook a lot because Ubuntu seems to work perfectly on it. I have a new 4 core Toshiba that has been a nightmare re: Ubuntu. I decided to wait for the next Ubuntu release.
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This reminded me a lot of Steve Yegge's "Good Agile, Bad Agile" ( http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile...):
"- Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.
- developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time... working on whatever they want, as long as it's not their main project.
- there aren't very many meetings. I'd say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead.
- there aren't Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I've ever seen."