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State of the GitHub: Chris Kelly Does the Numbers
I talked with Chris Kelly of GitHub at last week's LinuxCon about GitHub. He's got interesting things to say about the demographics and language choices on what has become in short order (just six years) one of the largest repositories of code in the world, and one with an increasingly sophisticated front-end, and several million users. Not all of the code on GitHub is open source, but the majority is -- handy, when that means an account is free as in beer, too. (And if you're reading on the beta or otherwise can't view the video below, here's the alternative video link.)
It does this:
$("#sdtranscript").toggle();
I'm not using beta, cuz I don't want to see live videos in the news feed, in case anyone @slashdot/@dice even cares...
Except if you were using beta, the video wouldn't show because beta doesn't support videos. Or the transcript for that matter.
Timothy Lord: Chris, can you explain your role with GitHub?
Chris Kelly: Yes, so you know, I do all of our outreach work. So, it’s us going out into the world, talking to people and getting them involved in their communities and really trying to amplify the work that’s already being done in the OpenSource world and how GitHub can support and promote that.
Timothy Lord: GitHub started obviously with Git, talk a little bit about the progression of going from a particular organization tool to having how many repos right now?
Chris Kelly: We have about 18 million public repos currently and we’ve got 6 million active users with accounts, so it’s gotten pretty big. So Git is what, 10 years old next year and so we started with that. It was just – the founders were really are getting involved with Git and needed a solution for solving like sending patches around via email problem, which was kind of a nightmare and so started building GitHub for themselves and that’s how the company has built itself all the way up for the last six years is building the tools to solve the problems that we have and we are all software developers and so it’s grown that way.
Timothy Lord: And it’s not like there is a lot of advertising that goes around saying to use GitHub; GitHub has grown pretty organically?
Chris Kelly: Yeah, so a lot of it has to do with our outreach. Being at conferences, meeting people, and really understanding what their problems are and really just being supportive of the community and then I think that’s the best way to really engage with any kind of audience, any company that’s interested in engaging with the developers is go be developers and go be part of the community. You can’t sell to that audience, you can just be a part of that audience and that really works.
Timothy Lord: Talk about some of the big projects that are on GitHub right now and what sort of scope, we’ve got one aspect of the scope of the entire site is number of users, but talk about some projects and how many commits you see happening?
Chris Kelly: Oh, I’d have to look at some graphs for number of commits. But we have really large projects coming on to GitHub all the time. Microsoft just put Typesafe on to GitHub recently. We’ve got the Rails project, is one of a classic example that the number of commits spiked the second I think Rail moved onto GitHub and started doing the development cycle. So we’re finding that a lot of open source projects, very large ones are moving under GitHub and seeing a lot of adoption and engagement from the community because we think we make it so much easier to both communicate about the project as well as contribute back to it.
Timothy Lord: Talking about the actual development because obviously people use GitHub as their own tool for developing software of their own. What’s the development work like for the software that runs GitHub?
Chris Kelly: So we used GitHub to do everything basically. So it manages all components of the way we work, so between GitHub itself and our open source chat system Hubot that sits on top of Campfire and Slack and HipChat. We can do all things you have in the very open and so that’s what we built GitHub for, is to try to change companies to start working more and more open and so we do it in the open, every project and every product feature gets talked about really publicly and everyone can contribute to that conversation. Everything that happens in our office, the events we put on, all happen in GitHub repos. The planning of this conference and showing up here is done in the GitHub repo. We do literally everything, GitHub repos with issues and port requests, because we think it’s the right way to work and so we’re really kind of stressing the way GitHub can function by doing that and then going on to the world and talking to other companies and that want to change the way their development cycles go and so that’s wha
A central "master server" is stilll useful from an organizational point of view.
The point behind git is that it's not special for any reason other than organization. In case of a problem (technical, political, maintainer disappears, whatever), there's no technical factor preventing you from failing over to another one very easily.
In all technical respects, the repository on my laptop is just as good as the central server. I don't have to be on line to examine history or make commits.
This also facilitates forking: I can clone a project and work on my fork with no special permissions.
In fact, a while ago there was a big problem (security breach) at kernel.org and the Linux kernel did do its official distribution from github for a few weeks.