> <i>For a long time, very key bits of our infrastructure were strung together with Shell scripts and simple scripting, and it’s surprisingly effective and still works really very well for us.</i><p>Key bits of the <i>world's</i> infrastructure still run on a bunch of flimsy shell scripts that seem like they'd break all the time but don't. If a computer program works reliably at all it will <i>probably</i> work reliably indefinitely, assuming the environment it lives in does not change substantially.<p>We probably all trust our lives to high end routers and medical equipment powered by shell scripts (or worse) every day. The code would scare you but, surprisingly, it will probably never fail you.
My favorite quote:<p><pre><code> this is actually a really pragmatic set of hackers
that just hack on Ruby, hack on C and spend their
time working on more interesting things using a
more stable stack, rather than chasing after the
latest and shiny tech.</code></pre>
Very nice read. Simple, stable and steady wins platform battles. It seems to do well at allowing them to keep focus and careful control of their product.<p>It's great to hear these core values are baked into their culture. I remember recently reading they were running Github pages on something like a pair of dedicated servers lol. Hats off, Github rocks.<p>Our team recently started using Jira for issues instead of Github ones. I have to say, if Github offered a $1 more per repo cost for better issue/wiki tier, I'd rather use that in a second.
My favorite quote:
"GitHub’s largely officeless workplace — about 60 percent of its employees work remotely, using a powerful homemade chatbot, called Hubot, to collaborate."
It's really cool to work wherever you like without lose the team's efficient.
> A month ago I was working from a cabin in the woods in Wisconsin.<p>OT, but has anyone else tried this? I've often fantasized about working while embedded in a beautiful nature setting, but I imagine it's tough to find good internet in such a place. I'm in California ... any recommendations?<p>I've also thought of copying Antony Garret Lisi's 'science hostel' idea [1] but for coders / entrepreneurs :)<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi#Science_hostel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Garrett_Lisi#Science_ho...</a>
Another thing that would be interesting to learn more about is their Front end structure. From what I can gather they keep things extremely simple (jQuery, mostly) and make extensive use of pjax and server generated javascript that gets evaluated by the client. If this is all there is to it then it is really impressive, considering how many other companies of similar or smaller size quickly inject a Javascript MVC on top of their stack the minute the interaction goes past simple forms (Airbnb comes to mind, who to my knowledge is using Backbone for some aspects of their app).<p>To be clear I think both approaches are excellent and all depends on the in-house talent, but nonetheless it's interesting to see how GitHub is sticking to a traditional, Rails-inspired document-based approach that minimizes front end complexity while other companies do not, even when both have similar UX complexity.
I'd be really curious to read more about how the Github team's intuition around polyglot programming and "Right Tool for the Job" rhetoric changed over time. I feel like I read a blog post about this one or two years ago but I can't remember which team member wrote it :)