GitHub's Next Move: Turn Everybody Into a Programmer

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GitHub's Next Move: Turn Everybody Into a Programmer

Posted by Soulskill on Friday October 2, 2015 @01:38AM from the boosting-razor-sales-by-forcing-100%-of-people-to-grow-beards dept.

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."

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Translation ... by gstoddart · 2015-10-02 01:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

and how the company is trying to live up to its $2 billion valuation
Sooner or later people will realize just how horribly overvalued we actually are, and we are desperately trying to do stupid things like turning everybody into a programmer so we can continue to prop up our overvalued company and continue to reap such awesome executive bonuses.
Honestly, WTF revenue do they have? I see so damned many companies being valued in the billions, and for what seems like no justifiable reason.
It's the .com era all over again ... "zomg, we have teh social" or whatever the daily buzzword is.
It's a great way to separate investors from their money. But I remain unconvinced any of these companies are actually worth anything in the billions.

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Lost at C:>. Found at C.
1. Re:Translation ... by TWX · 2015-10-02 01:56 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  It's the .com era all over again ... "zomg, we have teh social" or whatever the daily buzzword is.
  Yes it is. Lots of popular companies have either not figured out how to make a profit yet or have made their profits through means that were completely out of left-field.
  
  There are three ways for an Internet company with no tangible products to make money as far as I can tell, the first is to charge the users for some service, the second is to present advertising to the user in exchange for money from the advertising entity, and the third is to collect statistics on the userbase and sell that data to others.
  
  Github does not charge to host projects. Github therefore must use one of these three methods to make a profit if they don't start charging for use.
  
  I do not understand the love for Github. Admittedly my direct experience with it was in the course of using a huge spaghetti-mess of a curriculum management program called Canvas, but I found it no easier than a traditional CVS repository and harder to use than the package management provided by my OS.
  
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  Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
2. Re:Translation ... by umafuckit · 2015-10-02 02:06 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Github does not charge to host projects.
  GitHub's page listing their charges
  
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3. Re:Translation ... by TWX · 2015-10-02 02:10 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Github does not charge to host projects. Github therefore must use one of these three methods to make a profit if they don't start charging for use.
  It does: https://github.com/pricing
  Only public projects are free. And this is IMO a fair model. If you want to hide your code from the public, it means in most cases that your software is closed source. And that usually means you make money with it, where its just fair to give github a small part of it, these are basic economic "supply chain" rules. Conversely, if your code is public, it most likely is open source as well. There is some public content on github which is not open source licensed, but most of it is.
  And about learning git, it has a steep learning curve, but once you know it, its real fun. CVS isn't distributed, I really like git for its speed and features like git blame. Sadly many people think git == github.
  If I want to hide my projects from the public I'm not going to put them on someone else's server.
  
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  Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
4. Re:Translation ... by SQLGuru · 2015-10-02 02:20 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  This this this this.
  If I want to share the code, I'll use one of the public repos. If I don't want to share the code, that includes sharing via a server I don't control. I still might use Git style repo (or not, there are plenty of options), but I would self host.
5. Re:Translation ... by hodet · 2015-10-02 02:28 · Score: 2
  
  This is what I am wondering. What is the benefit of a private repo hosted on someone else's platform that you don't control. Any company with source they want to keep private would probably be hosting themselves. I am sure there are use cases but how much money do they actually make with private repos?
  I myself use github and its great. But if I am hacking around with concept stuff I usually just push it to my own private server, not to a github private repo i would have to pay for.
  There is also gitlab if you really want the gui.
6. Re:Translation ... by MightyYar · 2015-10-02 02:41 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  If I want to hide my projects from the public I'm not going to put them on someone else's server.
  Well, that's you. I'm not a security expert and I'm not a big corporation that can afford to hire one. So for me, it's probably more secure to use someone else's server.
  
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7. Re:Translation ... by __aaclcg7560 · 2015-10-02 03:18 · Score: 2
  
  It's the .com era all over again ... "zomg, we have teh social" or whatever the daily buzzword is.
  Not exactly. The dot com era was your grandmother and her cats investing in the latest tech stock tip that inflated the bubble. These days its too much money chasing too few investment opportunities that offer a higher rate of return in this low interest rate environment. If the Fortune 500 companies stopped buying back their own stock, the overall market would be much lower than it is today.
8. Re:Translation ... by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-02 03:20 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  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.
Oh, this has fail written all over by hyperar · 2015-10-02 01:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

Basically, if every developer in the world uses and loves GitHub, the next logical step is to turn more people into developers.
If the starting point is false, then this has no way to succed.
1. Re:Oh, this has fail written all over by Yunzil · 2015-10-02 02:27 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Yeah, I'm a developer, and I neither use nor love GitHub. Sorry.
Re: Software Engineering as unskilled labor by 0xdeaddead · 2015-10-02 01:49 · Score: 2

they feel running cvs is worth 2 billion.
Slight over valuation?
Ecosystem. by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-02 01:53 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.
Not this shit again by JustAnotherOldGuy · 2015-10-02 01:55 · Score: 5, Insightful

Seriously, STOP trying to make everybody a programmer. It's not going to happen, and it shouldn't happen.
Why not make everyone a plumber or a mechanic or an insurance agent? BECAUSE IT'S STUPID, just like trying to make everyone a programmer.

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Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
1. Re:Not this shit again by __aaclcg7560 · 2015-10-02 03:32 · Score: 2
  
  We need more plumbers, mechanics and other skilled tradesmen. Alas, most high schools no longer have a vocational track and everyone goes to college. The construction trades are hurting today as most of the foreign workers gone home after the Great Recession.
2. Re:Not this shit again by Tablizer · 2015-10-02 04:19 · Score: 2
  
  [programming craze] lasted until the "Nursing Craze"
  You just clued me in to a sure-seller title:
  "Nursing Node.JS Code Back to Health for Dummies Unleashed in 7 Days."
  
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  Table-ized A.I.
Adapt GitHub To Other Uses by CastrTroy · 2015-10-02 02:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think the next logical step is to adapt GitHub to do change management on other kinds of documents, not just source code files. It would probably help out a lot of students for them to learn how to manage all their essays and other assignments with a change management system. Working on group projects would be a lot easier if it was easier to share files and merge changes with people working on the same project.
Working with a big MS Word document with a group of people using the "track changes" feature is a lot more painful than sharing a software project between a bunch of developers. But it shouldn't be. There is a huge need for people in other fields to be able to collaborate on a document, and see how it has changed over time.
Just imagine if all the bills that were written were entered into a source control system with hourly commits before they were voted for in Congress. I would be much nicer if people were able to easily see what changed as the bill approached the floor for voting. It would be a lot harder to slip things in at the last moment.

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Re:Software Engineering as unskilled labor by Xiaran · 2015-10-02 02:02 · Score: 2

Back in the day Visual Basic was going to remove the need for programmers. Programming GUI apps would be so easy the management could do it. That turned out OK didn't it?
They need to host non-code by muons · 2015-10-02 02:07 · Score: 2

Not everyone can (or should) be a programmer. They need to promote themselves as a collaborative environment for everything and differentiate themselves from Google Drive. It is much easier to see who did what and when in git and any file type is possible. There is no good way to do file compare on some file types within GitHub, but that could be fixed. The loss of seeing the edits that other people make in near-real-time is probably no big deal.
Maybe you should focus... by RedK · 2015-10-02 03:02 · Score: 2

... on not introducing toxic Codes of Conduct that split apart your community and are downright bigoted in order to push a particular agenda ?
Won't have to "make" new developers if you don't chase your existing ones away.

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"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Re:Programmer for 30+ years by grimmjeeper · 2015-10-02 03:17 · Score: 2

37 years here. Never used GitHub either.
I use Git, for sure, but there's no way my employer would let their code be stored outside of the company servers, for good reason.