Ryan Tomayko

Pull Requests 2.0 —

I’ve been working with kneath on this pretty much since the day we started at GitHub almost a year ago. Not full time but whenever we could steal time away from other projects. We’re both stoked to have finally shipped it.

I wrapped the original blog post draft with this sentence:

Pull requests elevate the collaborative aspects of development to creative works in their own right. We can’t wait to see where you take them!

We ended up striking it — a little too floaty for a product/feature announcement. I believe every word of it, though.

Building Filesystems the Way You Build Web Apps —

Interesting concept. Layer the routing guts found in modern web frameworks over Linux’s FUSE userland filesystem stuff and you get a nice model for developing custom filesystems.

The small example (~30 LOC) shows how to build a simple GitHub filesystem, which gives you this:

opus:~ broder$ ./githubfs /mnt/githubfs
opus:~ broder$ ls /mnt/githubfs
opus:~ broder$ ls /mnt/githubfs/ebroder
anygit      githubfs     pyhesiodfs  python-simplestar
auto-aklog  ibtsocs  python-github2  python-zephyr
bluechips   libhesiod    python-hesiod
debmarshal  ponyexpress  python-moira
debothena   pyafs    python-routefs
opus:~ broder$ ls /mnt/githubfs
ebroder

Pretty awesome.

alandipert's ncsa-mosaic —

The sources for NCSA Mosaic v2.7 — one the first graphical web browsers (1993) and certainly the one that led to the World Wide Web as we know it — can now be found on GitHub.

You can even run it on a modern Linux. Here’s what the GitHub homepage looks like:

The team that built NCSA Mosaic (Marc Andreessen et al) would go on to create Mosaic Communications Corp., which eventually became Netscape Communications Corp., which open sourced the Mozilla browser, leading to Firefox.

I wonder if any of the original NCSA Mosaic code still exists in any form at mozilla.org.

The Mosaic Wikipedia entry has a thorough history.

Introducing GitHub Compare View —

It’s a commit list (git log --online --reverse <start>..<end>), a rolled up diff + diffstat (git diff --stat <start>...<end>), and commit comments all on one page. Here it is in action showing all changes between the Sinatra 0.9.4 and 1.0.a releases:

Dogfood never tasted so good. We’ve been incrementally using and developing and using and developing this thing for a few months now. It’s become a core part of our code review process. I’m extremely happy with how it turned out.

My take on the GitHub process —

I’ve received a lot of positive feedback on this blog post length comment left on Rafe’s recent post about GitHub’s process, or lack thereof. In it, I try to address some of the common objections people have when they hear how things work inside GitHub.

Scott Chacon on The Geek Talk —

Working with Scott is such a huge honor. I don’t even have words to describe it, really. He’s a class act. You get a glimpse of it in this interview.

He even lets loose some GitHub secrets:

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. It’s sort of the open source software style of business – everyone itches their own scratch. Inexplicably, it works really well and keeps everyone engaged, new features appearing quickly and bugs fixed rather fast. No managers, directors, PMs or departments – and it’s the most agile, focused and efficient team I’ve ever worked with. Maybe we should write a book about it.

Do whatever you want. Do it now. Don’t fuck around.

The fighting's been fun and all, but it's time to shut up and get along —

Benjamin Pollack — one of the guys that helped build Fog Creek’s Mercurial based source control system, Kiln — pleads for Git and Hg folks to stop bickering over stupid shit and team up to go after the massive number of Subversion/CVS holdouts.

I can confirm one of his points:

It’s easy, in the yin/yang of Hacker News and proggit, to forget that most developers are not even aware of what DVCSes are or what they do. Yeah. Sounds crazy, I know, but trust me on this.

This is true. My second day on the job at GitHub was spent at the Zend PHP conference. Maybe 10% of the people we talked to had any awareness of DVCS at all, and a big chunk of that 10% hadn’t used DVCS seriously on a project. This was six months ago.

For most popular programming language communities, I’d put the percentage of developers that really understand DVCS under 1%.

hub: git + hub = github —

defunkt’s hub is a command line utility that adds GitHub knowledge to git. Sweet. It expands GitHub repository references so you can do stuff like: git clone defunkt/gist, git remote add bmizerany, etc.

Beastie Boys - The Bill Adler File —

Nobody ever believes me when I tell them the Beastie Boys toured with Madonna in 1984-85. Here’s a great set of super high-res press clippings to prove it:

Why isn’t everybody this cool?:

Bill Adler was the director of publicity for Def Jam in the 80s. He allowed me to photocopy his press file on the Beastie Boys from the time when they opened for Madonna.

This is presently the topic of great discussion in the GitHub campfire.

Resque —

Really excited to see Chris release the shiny new Redis-based work queue that’s been running GitHub for the past couple of months:

It boils down to this: GitHub is a warzone. We are constantly overloaded and rely very, very heavily on our queue. If it’s backed up, we need to know why. We need to know if we can fix it. We need workers to not get stuck and we need to know when they are stuck. We need to see what the queue is doing. We need to see what jobs have failed. We need stats: how long are workers living, how many jobs are they processing, how many jobs have been processed total, how many errors have there been, are errors being repeated, did a deploy introduce a new one?

I’m still getting my feet wet with the jobs system but I can’t wait to get my hands dirty in the guts of this thing.

rtomayko forked defunkt/github —

It’s with great pleasure that I today announce:

I’ve taken a full-time engineering position with GitHub! It starts today.

Unicorn! —

GitHub documents the how and why behind their Unicorn setup. Also, for the record, the fork(2) + shared accept socket technique described in my Unicorn is Unix piece was first explained to me by Chris and Tom.

The Git Parable —

tl;dr — that’s why it’s awesome.

Integrity - The easy and fun automated continuous integration server —

Ruby based continuous integration server that rocks. Built on Sinatra and DataMapper. Painless setup, beautiful web UI, hooks up to GitHub. I wish I’d went and looked at this earlier.

How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub —

Tom Preston-Werner on how GitHub came into being and leaving Powerset after the Microsoft acquisition: “When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say ‘wow, that was an adventure,’ not ‘wow, I sure felt safe.’”

GitHub Adds Gem Server Support —

A gem for your project is automatically built each time the project_name.gemspec file is changed on your master branch.

Say hello to the (GitHub) Network Graph Visualizer —

Now this is the kind of direction I hope to see GitHub and Gitorious go in the future.

I Can Haz Hardcore Forking Action —

More praise for GitHub from a small team of Django hackers that built a site in three hours on one night with a little help from git…

GitHub: rtomayko's Profile —

Huge thanks to al3x for the invite. I’ll be writing up my experience over the next week or so.

GitHub —

Seriously interesting web based git browser and collaboration tool from the folks at Engine Yard. If anyone has a spare invite laying around, hook me up: rtomayko@gmail.com. I have a bunch of stuff sitting in bzr repos that I’d like to flip over to git.