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  How GitHub Works: Creativity is Important

We want to foster a creative environment. We love it when employees hack on side projects. It gets people excited. Excitement is contagious, and spreads easily from one project to another. Even if we’ll never make money on that side project, the excitement generated from it can bleed into things that will make us money. Alcohol It’s no secret that there’s more than a few people at GitHub who like to drink. I mean, we have four beers on-tap at the office in our kegerator. B...

   GitHub,HR,Creativity,Innovation,Recruitm     2011-08-19 07:46:07

  The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful. Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, ...

   Software,Obvious,Easy,Possible,Requirements     2011-11-30 11:48:12

  Revenue = X

We've been experimenting with app prices for quite some time and again and again we've noticed a funny effect:No matter what price we choose, we always make the same revenue.I attached two charts to illustrate that. I recently lowered the price of the iPad app (http://bit.ly/92xWv1) from 5 to 1 Dollars. At first the sales spike, then they even out to previous levels. Meaning: By cutting the price by factor 5, I am selling exactly 5 x more apps. Then we lowered the price of iA Writer for Mac...

   Revenue,Price,Productivity,Investment,Discount,Software     2011-11-17 02:31:58

  Lessons Learned About Documentation

Here at Kendo UI, we have always encouraged you to give us feedback.  Whether it’s through our forums, or the Kendo UI User Voice site, what you think is important to us.  We take your thoughts very seriously.  We receive a lot of feature requests, enhancement requests and other various pieces of product feedback. One of the things that we heard loud and clear from our users was that our documentation could be better.  We took a good look at what we had, and we ag...

   Documentation,Lessons,Programming     2012-02-15 05:53:28

  An Object is not a Hash

Following my article A String is not an Error, I want to bring attention to an issue that similarly applies to JavaScript in general, but has special relevance in the Node.JS environment. The problem boils down to the usage of {} as a data-structure where the keys are supplied by untrusted user input, and the mechanisms that are normally used to assert whether a key exists. Consider the example of a simple blog created with Express. We decide to store blog posts in memory in a {}, indexed ...

   Object,Hash,Node.js,JavaScript     2012-01-19 10:16:10

  How GitHub Works: Be Asynchronous

This is — by far — my favorite aspect of working at GitHub. Everything is asynchronous. Chat GitHub didn’t have an office for the first two years. Chat rooms (in our case, Campfire) is where things got done. Today we’ve moved into our second office, and Campfire is still where we get things done. There’s a reason for that: chat is asynchronous. Asynchronous communication means I can take a step out for lunch and catch up on transcripts when I get back. Async...

   GitHub,Work,Style,Asynchronous,Efficienc     2011-08-19 07:44:20

  The Best Hackers In The World All Come From One Country

Facebook, Zynga, and other hot companies use Interview Street to recruit programmers. Interview Street posts programming challenges and invites contenders to solve as many as they can. According to their message board, nine of Interview Street's top ten hackers are all from China. One is from an unknown country. A hacker called ralekseenkov, who is ranked number 11, is from the United States. What does that say about the talent crunch here? Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/hackers-...

   Hacker,Country,China,Microsoft     2012-04-11 13:17:55

  How GitHub Works: Hours are Bullshit

Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote the seminal analysis of management and efficiency in 1911 with The Principles of Scientific Management. He took the first scientific approach towards maximizing efficiency in manufacturing jobs. Time is money. Faster is better. More hours are better. Hours are bullshit Hours are great ways to determine productivity in many industries, but not ours. Working in a startup is a much different experience than working in a factory. You can’t throw more time at a...

   Work,Style,Time,Efficiency,Code,Enforcem     2011-08-19 07:42:32

  Don't Give Your Users Shit Work

The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do.Shit workTake a look at Twitter Lists. The idea behind Twitter Lists was that users would carefully cultivate lists on Twitter of different accounts they’re following (or not following). These could be divided into lists like Family, Friends, Coworkers, People I Find Mildly Attractive, People To Murder, People I Find Mildly Attractive And Want To Murder, and so on.The problem is that, anecdota...

   Design,Facebook,Twitter,User oriented     2011-11-03 13:28:59

  The worst part working at Google

Google is rated as the best employer to work for in last few years. This is because Google provides not only flexible working environment but also attractive welfare. For the benefits of working at Google, you can find many posts online. However, is there any bad part to work at Google? The answer is YES. There is no perfect company in the world, there are also bad parts working at Google.  The worst part of working at Google, for many people is that they're overqualified for their job. Goo...

   Google,Bad part     2013-10-24 22:10:37

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