Have you?

How do you manage your time?

1. Do you pick projects or does someone pick them for your (thinking of GitHub-specific stuff here)?
2. Do you report on said projects to someone specifically or just to your team? Is it constant (campfire)? Is it formal?
3. Do you say what you're working on – specifically – to other people?

I'm curious how you organize the spread of information through small teams and through GitHub as a whole. I recently had a discussion with my own team because they rely heavily on IM and email for communication. I believe this approach dulls people to what should be important (email) or urgent (IM), and it fuels an urge for meetings to discuss casual topics because it effectively forces one-to-one communication on everything, or worse, emails to all.

I am going to stalk you. I don't mean it in a weird way. I mean it in a very normal, everyday, staring through your window, hanging out on a tree in your front yard, way.

No but seriously, stalk.

Ok, just kidding, but seriously - I love octodex.github.com, and I never really knew who to tell that to. Did you have anything to do with that?

On a side note, stalk.

What I understand so far is this. You don't have priorities and you don't have deadlines. But what gets done is gauged on "is something important" and the important things are generally known to everyone. So to dive in a little deeper here....

HOW is something determine to be important and by who?

HOW are things generally known to everyone to be important? What occurs that makes the devs think it should be taken care of?

Just trying to get a better understand of this organizational void I see.

dev, etc.

What is Your CI?
Do You have manual testing?
Just wanna know about Your "every developer push to production" deployment strategy. How GitHub assured that there are no errors in code? Link to blog post I haven`t seen (any blog post about that) accepted=)

Slow your roll. I'm getting nervous.

So, I'm interested(as are my coworkers, I think) about how we could start to affect the Boss and our managers toward more flexible or hourless days. We all work on salary basis as is, some of us have commutes lasting nearly an hour. I personally have gotten used to starting my day at ≈ 8am, but I know some of my coworkers would love the opportunity to come-and-go and just be responsible for their own shit. A few specific questions include:

• How do you handle one employe being blocked by another (What if the end of my day is the beginning of yours?)
• How would you handle a metric to know what to charge or how long something would take? Is "3 good days or 2 bad ones and 2 good ones" expected and acceptable?
• How do you keep people accountable before it's too late? Is the only way of managing this kind of workforce by hiring managers to review and lord over everything your employee's do, every day?
• How do the managers handle necessary face time with an employee who's schedule is the opposite(or, conflicting) of their own?

Keeping in mind that we take on projects, and so far have not developed any of our own. The hourless work day seems very feasible in a business where you upkeep and iterate on a single product and those product's owners are the employee's, but what about when clients are constantly communicating with managers and things are being delegated/iterated throughout the day based on client feedback or client-project realizations?

Thanks for any elaboration on not only how GitHub works, but, more so how to affect those changes in an existing organization.

Two part question, and by that I mean two questions:

1. Pretty much everything I've seen from you is off-topic/side-projecty/hilarious. What is your actual function at GitHub? Which things were you hired to work on and which current features are you responsible for?
2. Working at GitHub sounds like a fucking dream, both for the environment and because there are few products/sites I love and use so much. The primary focus of my life is getting better at programming (primarily Ruby and JavaScript). How do I know when I'm a good enough programmer to try to get hired there? How do I even know if I'd be a good fit, were I to be appropriately skilled?
3. I said TWO questions. Pay attention!

Or only Mac OS X?
And what about the other employees of GitHub?

1. If you weren't working at GitHub, where else would you love to work?
2. In the song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini", which is yellow, the bikini or the polka dots?

I believe you mentioned there is a chat that the devs are in. How active is that and how does it affect productivity? Do you guys "turn off" for periods to get some stuff?

I know GitHub uses Hubot to begin deploys, I was wondering what is actually used in the back end for deploying, is it just Capistrano, or do you guys use something else?

Hey, had a thought: how about a handy dandy visual cue for git upstream changes for Mac GitHub? I'm discovering just how handy it is to fork projects and yet rather than remembering to yank down upstream changes, it would be nice to have a visual cue on each project that has the upstream added and a prompt to git fetch upstream.

Heck, while we're at it, perhaps have an option to add an upstream from the UI, but the visual cue alone would be super handy.

I'm so sorry...

Can you description a working day at Github? What time did people normally get in? How are features officially decided/approved? I'm sure anyone can't just write whatever they want. I also notice you guys work pretty late sometimes, is this due to too much fun or working hard or BOTH. Also, are you guys hiring more devs?

By the way, I love your screencasts. I hope there are more to come! Sorry for the ass load of questions. Just curious. :)

I agree, brisket is amazing and the best, but just because the run out does not mean you should give up on BBQ. :penis:

Where do you collect your stars?

Is the source for holman/tweets somewhere accessible?

So.. with the everyone does everything and everyone does whatever mentality who is driving the product? Who has the vision? Who turns the bad ideas down? etc etc..

Admittedly you are a developer company making tools for developers so I believe the landscape is different than with a company who is making products for say the medical industry.

From what I understand so far a lot of this comes from the designers. But what if what one designer wants is not a direction the "company" wants?

I'm so sick of uncooked pasta

I just read your article "Hours are bullshit". I agree - for now however hours were the only measurable thing that we can bill.

Do you have an idea what should replace hours? What kind of metric should we use to measure productivity?

Do you use something like Trello or AgileZen?

What is the remediation procedure?

There are two types of people in this world: Geeks and non-geeks.

I am the non-geeks, who raised as non-geeks but few years back, found peace in the world of the internet and making my path blindly into the Geeks world.

Basically my current learning flow is just start toying and experimenting with projects (I was forking, watching and i don't know what else I was doing/destroying) instead of "researching" and waste more time.

I have to be honest, it gets "nowhere". I learn some stuffs, but with the time I put in, i think I am lost most of the time.

My question is: How would you do it if you were a beginner/newbie that's toying and experimenting github?

What would be your self-help resources, instead of doing things like what I am doing right now, asking you question and hope that someone can share their experiences and insights.

I thank you for your time and concern.

And by programming I mean including writing little throwaway things as well as actual "production" code. Also do you have any specific "will not write code" hours/times to just get away from it all and refresh?

?? :)

How is github currently organized? One rails app with different rack applications like sinatra and whatever else tossed in and mounted at different routes? Can we get a post about how things are organized and what you use and how? Bonus nachos for pictured of the file structure and anything else (I like unicorns).

Is it wordpress (if so what theme)? Jekyll? Is your setup open source?

Previously I opened issue https://github.com/holman/holman.github.com/issues/4 but it was closed by you. The issue wasn't resolved, it made me want to 👊 your 💄 with my ✊.

Please take the time to resolve the previously mentioned issue.

Hey Zach—

After reading your Working at Github series, I've come up with a question of task management. You've said that hours are bullshit. I've got curious, what do you guys use for managing tasks? Do you set estimations? What's you feature workflow, from understanding the need of a feature to delivering it?

It would be awesome to hear a little bit about it.

Best,
@bai

Hey Zack, just wondering which editor you use for programming. Thanks!

Feel free to say no... but I think you're cool and my office is near GitHub's

I understand that you would prefer a pull request. But, I use many projects which are made in languages I have never used. For example, I have a feature request on your boom project.

How do you do it? People want to know.

I would love to hear what other things you are interested in - writing, painting, music, working out and so on. The reason I ask is I wonder if you have any suggestions for sparking Creativity.

I'm really interested in learning more with regards to how Github tests, specifically from the perspective of the Rails/Ruby code you ship. For instance:

• Are you doing unit, functional and integration testing?
• Any particular frameworks being used to support this effort?
• How are you testing client side effects, interactions, etc.?

Thanks!

Do you use it?

Does github use an organization? If so, how are pull requests managed? Do you fork the repo as yourself and then do a pull request from a branch on that fork or is there some other way it can be done?

-- cwebber

After seeing the software you use in #21, what does your work desk look like? (Picture?)

That would be sweet!