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GitHub's Next Move: Turn Everybody Into a Programmer
mattydread23 writes: This interview with GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath and product VP Kakul Srivastava explains a little more what GitHub is planning for the future — and how the company is trying to live up to its $2 billion valuation. Basically, if every developer in the world uses and loves GitHub, the next logical step is to turn more people into developers. "Even today, Wanstrath says, there are journalists and scientists who are using GitHub to find, build, and share data-driven applications that assist with research or interactive projects. The goal, then, is to gradually make it a lot easier for anybody to get started on the platform. As more and more people get educated as programmers from an early age, Wanstrath wants GitHub to be the service of choice for the next generation to really get their feet wet."
Github has become evil by accepting issue attachements in closed M$ formats .DOCX and .PPTX. If you try to attach any odf based format, you get an error. Link to a blog article about this troubling topic: here
Why do we want to turn everyone in a coder?
It's the same as turning everyone into a pianist or turning every biologists into physicist. It's about the ecosystem, we need to be different to thrive.
I, personally love mathematics, but would hate it if everyone were "forced"/"encouraged" into it. It's supposed to be fun and not a chore or imperative they needed to complete. I have had enough of that in my life.
I think the big benefit for a lot of the companies (especially small ones) is that you don't have to maintain the server.
I know I know... setting up a git server is easy.... but if you open up that server to the outside world in any fashion, you basically open up your network to attack.
Are you a SaaS company? Your software isn't your primary business, so it's not a super-huge deal if it gets compromised... but maybe you process credit cards and require PCI compliance or something along those lines. You've now likely got to spend an extra few thousand a year to make sure that one server is up to date and is compliant with those guidelines, not to mention the cost of hardware itself. Why not just spend an extra $25/mo so that your concerns are offloaded to another company (which you can always sue if things go sideways).
It's not always about "keeping your code safe" but sometimes it's about separation of concern.