Tag Archives: github

GitHub hits 3 million users

In a world where hitting 10, 50, and 100 million users seems to be the goal it is nice to see that a service can be a massive success at a fraction of that scale. GitHub just hit 3,000,000 users and their growth rate is still on the incline:

This latest batch of one million amazing developers joined GitHub in just the last five months.

GitHub isn’t for your mom (though I’m sure the team at GitHub would appreciate you teaching her how to use git). But it seems like GitHub is being found by exactly who it is for. And that’s awesome.

Congratulations to the entire team (especially my friends there).

The rise of enterprise marketing

Chris Dixon has a good post about the shift from sales-driven software efforts to product-driven software efforts.

Thus enterprise software went from being about sales (one-to-one) to being about marketing (one-to-many). Marketing requires crafting a compelling message, figuring out the right channels and then optimizing. But the most effective marketing is a compelling product that can be easily tried.

But I don’t see it as a shift. Large organizations still make decisions the same way that they used to, it just just that there are far more small businesses today than anytime in history. Thus, there is more business to be had using a friendly marketing message and easy-to-use and trialable software.

Even the examples given, like Github, have enterprise-level efforts. They have sales people. And while they may paint a pretty picture about their efforts being largely about building a great product… they recognize that the buying power, in these larger organizations, still does not lay with the developers.

PJ Hyett, Co-Founder of Github:

“The remaining 1% of customers is where sales comes into play. Much in the same way support guides folks through technical questions, we needed people to guide customers through business questions. Not only that, developers within larger organizations sometimes need help convincing the people with the purchasing authority to buy the products they really, really want to use.”

So rather than calling it a shift, I’d call it the growth of small business that we’re seeing. Companies with flatter organizational structures and smaller teams than previously needed, aided by technology of course, so that SaaS companies can land a significant amount of business outside of the enterprise.

It is a boon, right now, for software developers. At every level. Product-driven software efforts and sales-driven software efforts are both here to stay. All you need to do is choose which level you want to play at and play by that game’s rules.

/via Rob Sandie.

What an investment in GitHub could mean

GitHub:

Today we are partnering with Andreessen Horowitz and announcing our first ever outside investment.

The amount? $100,000,000. Even in today’s money this is a fair amount of capital for GitHub to have on-hand. What will this be used for?

GitHub mentions, in several of the quotes posted to various tech news outlets, that they want to make “GitHub easier for beginners and more powerful for experts”. But I think there is a lot more to it than that. I think they are going to tackle every point of collaboration needed to develop software.

Think about what GitHub already has for software developers and designers to work together; source control (the Hub) with organizations, Issues tracker, Wiki, Page generator for marketing, SpeakerDeck for presentations, Gauges for analytics. These are all fairly essential to a software developer. And most of them are useable on most of the world’s popular devices through a slew of applications and services that GitHub has only just begun pushing versions of.

In addition to all of these things, GitHub has a great help section and also does a lot of training and conferences and even co-sponsored a new online tutorial to help newbs learn git. If a software team brings on someone new they can get them up to speed very, very quickly and get to work collaborating in a relatively short time. And GitHub is who helps them do that.

But, what else do software developers need to get the job done? What else could GitHub provide? What else could all of that $100,000,000 help them hire, acquire, or build? Well, GitHub for Enterprise – while a great product I’m sure – takes a whole workforce to build, manage, and support. And while GitHub’s team has swelled very quickly to over 100 team members I’d wager they still need to bring on even more talent in that area to service the Facebooks, Googles, Microsofts, and Oracles of the world. GitHub Enterprise could be the choice for software powerhouses to collaborate privately and locally.

What else? Believe it or not, there is still a fair amount missing from GitHub’s offerings. And I’ve only thought about this for a short period of time. No doubt GitHub has countless options on their table. But, here are a few.

A practical way for people to sell their software (or support for it) through GitHub? Even open source software junkies need to make money. Perhaps GitHub could offer a simple way to handle that transaction or allow people to only get support if they’re a “subscriber”.

A much more feature complete website creation tool? GitHub Pages is great. They’ve got some of the best designers I’ve ever met (and even worked with) working on them. And, they’ve got a few services hidden under the hood (like Jekyll) to help them do some pretty great stuff. But, it could be a lot easier, a lot more powerful, and they could charge more for it

A way to chat? The GitHub team has notoriously been using Campfire in ways I’m sure even 37signals didn’t expect – complete with their own bot – but I could see them needing a much more robust solution as they push towards hundreds of employees spread out over the globe and constantly moving.

A better discovery engine could also be put into place to help people find great software projects. Since its inception GitHub has done a pretty good job showing developers how to find repositories to collaborate on – but I could see this same engine changing into a powerful marketing tool for average, every day people to find great software, plugins, or scripts they may need to download or get support for.

Something else I’ve also thought that GitHub could focus on is bringing git into the workflows of other digital professionals and not just programmers and designers. (Though that market is probably large enough on its own.) Tech savvy writers, chefs, and others have put git to good use for their text-based documents. But what about working git and GitHub into their workflows by plugging into their software? Making it nearly invisible to version their work for them, help them collaborate, track, and promote their work. Something even non-tech savvy people could use. And those types of people are just the low-hanging fruit… I could also see doctors, nurses, photographers, executive assistants, retailers, musicians, and many, many other professionals using the power of git and GitHub to collaborate and version their work in ways that – today – may seem hard to dream up.

With the talent that GitHub is amassing, the momentum they’ve built up, and the resources at their disposal – GitHub could tackle some of the toughest problems facing the tech-using world and release some incredibly elegant solutions.

 

Feel free to discuss on Hacker News.

GitHub, getting easier all the time

My friend Kyle Neath on the GitHub blog:

Today we’re rolling out a new and improved flow for creating repositories on GitHub.

Remember when I said this, shortly after GitHub released GitHub for Mac:

If Git is easy to use more people will use it and therefore more people will sign up and pay for GitHub.

It is just as important for Github to make git easier, so that its potential customer base expands beyond us geeks, as it is to promote best practices (like including a .gitignore file with one’s repo). This is why the GitHub website with its ease of use, documentation, training, etc. is really such a great business.

You see, GitHub isn’t just in the business of giving people access to git. They’re in the business of helping people to use git the right way. They’re creating some of the most loyal customers you’ll find anywhere online.

Nilai: Introducing Previews

See also: Introducing Smart Labels.

Nilai has quickly morphed from being a simple list of links to many lists of links each with their own purpose. Using Smart Labels, which are getting smarter with each release, members of Nilai can save links into these lists with a single click.

Sometimes the purpose of saving these links is to watch a video, listen to a bit of audio, or save a link to do something with at a later time. Starting today it is easier than ever to accomplish some of these tasks without ever having to leave Nilai. Previews make it simple to preview links to video, audio, photos, products, or even code. By simply saving a bookmark to the more than 12 supported services Nilai will automatically identify what the link is to and prepare a preview for you.

Let me give you some examples. The most obvious example is video. If you’re like me you don’t have time during your work day to watch YouTube videos that are being circulated throughout the web via Twitter or from my friends via instant messages. So I save these bookmarks to Nilai to watch later. Now, with Previews, Nilai will let me watch the video on my iPad, iPhone, or my Mac without needing to open the YouTube application or website. It looks like this.

For me audio works much the same way. Sometimes I have time to listen to a bit of audio – like on my 90-mile drive to work. For those occasions I prefer to subscribe to a podcast powered by Huffduffer. But, what if I want to listen to a bit of audio in a few hours on my computer or perhaps on my iPad at night in bed? Using Previews Nilai makes it possible to listen to audio from services like Huffduffer and others without needing to subscribe to a podcast or sync with iTunes. Quick, simple.

Video, audio, and photos is just the beginning. Here is a list of the services that Previews supports today: YouTube, Viddler, Flickr, Vimeo, Speaker Deck, Dribbble, Instagram, Twitpic, Skitch, Github’s Gists, Huffduffer. With many, many more on the way. In fact, I’ll tell you straight away that all of the popular recipe sites are next.

I hope you enjoy the new site and Previews.

WordPress Post formats Admin UI

WordPress 3.1 exhibited an underlying feature that didn’t reveal itself in the UI in much of any way. Post formats. Post formats are sort of like categories of posts but are used to “handle” different post types in different ways. You can read more about Post formats over on the WordPress Codex.

Crowd Favorite has released an open source WordPress plugin * that changes the Admin UI and sets up standards for a few different post formats. Here, their description is better:

“The plugin is a completely additive solution that leverages the default WordPress functionality, while improving the UI and standardizing the names and presentation of custom fields that support the various post formats.”

Post formats has limitless possibilities as you extend WordPress from a simple blogging tool to a much more powerful CMS… but this plugin seems to focus on the modern day blogger.

This interests me in that I use categories to handle my different post formats. Which is how everyone that has ever used WordPress had to do it. I’ve got mobile photos, links, videos, and longer posts I call notes, and larger photos. It would be great to start using post formats to post different types of formats – I’m looking forward to digging into this.

* Side note: So glad Crowd Favorite switched to Github. I hope other WordPress developers quickly follow suit. In fact, I think WordPress.org should change the way they host WordPress plugins to git.

Introducing Shh: An AppleScript and Alfred Extension to close all those noisy streams

As the work day progresses I find myself with more and more “streams” open. Not long after I log onto my computer in the morning Twitter, Skype, iChat, Mail and other streams are open and active and at multiple points throughout the day they steal my attention.

However, there are times when I just want to focus on what I’m doing. Mac OS X Lion’s new fullscreen feature is designed to help me focus on a single application at a time. However, when Skype, iChat, Mail, or Twitter are open they will notify me (audibly or with bouncing icons) when they’d like my attention. They will inevitably pull me away from what I’m doing to see what is going on.

Skype, for me, is the biggest culprit because our team at Viddler uses Skype as the primary way to communicate. So even though Skype is notifying me that there is something new in Skype sometimes it is just some of the team members chatting about what’s for lunch and really isn’t meant for me and isn’t high-priority.

So there are times that I do not want to be distracted or even notified that something is going on in Skype. I want to be left completely alone and work on whatever it is I’m focused on. Enter Shh, an AppleScript and/or Alfred Extension (I love Alfred) that will quickly close these four applications. It is a dead simple script that closes all of these applications at once (rather than closing them individually).

I’m guessing that I will extend this script to include other applications over time and even enhance it in some way (perhaps by forcing the foremost application into fullscreen mode on OS X Lion or turning off Growl notifications) so if you’re interested in such things be sure to watch this project on Github or contribute to it yourself.

Kyle Neath on Designing GitHub for Mac

I’m always looking for validation of my hair-brained ideas. In Kyle Neath’s post on his designing GitHub for Mac I found this nugget which backs up my assumptions that I made about GitHub for Mac being a big deal.

“Eventually, I (well, many of us) decided that better native clients (OSX, Windows, Linux, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc) was the best way to grow GitHub.”

Boom.

GitHub for Mac is a big deal

Many command line elitists may not be all that excited about GitHub for Mac, an application for managing your local and GitHub-hosted Git repositories by the GitHub team, but I’m sure they’ll respect what I feel is its ambitious goal.

You see, with one application GitHub has just expanded its potential customer base many times larger than it already is. GitHub isn’t just for command line elitists anymore. Now just about anyone that can use a Mac application, and understand what it is to commit a new version of their work here and there, can use Git and GitHub to help control their source.

Before today GitHub’s potential customer base, or target-market if you will, has been those that fully grok Git, the command line, and source control. Or, people willing to put in the work to go through the tutorials to become one of these people. Their website was simply icing on the cake for people already using that workflow. In fact, their service was so compelling that many have switched from other source control platforms to Git just to take advantage of GitHub. However, now for all of the designers, copywriters, hobbyists and even solo development shoppes that didn’t seen the need to learn and fully understand source control – Git just got easy and GitHub made it happen. And that is many, many, many people.

Some, including myself, would argue that this could breed a bunch of people that understand GitHub for Mac more than they understand Git. And I think it is fairly obvious that understanding Git, for any professional, is more valuable than understanding GitHub for Mac. However, now that I’ve thought it over for these last few hours I’m beginning to see this application as an extension of GitHub’s many other offerings to make Git easier. You see, GitHub has always provided documentation, events, online training and tools to try to make Git easier for everyone. If Git is easy to use more people will use it and therefore more people will sign up and pay for GitHub. GitHub for Mac is simply an extension of these educational efforts that GitHub has always offered since the beginning. It is yet another lily pad for people to jump on as they cross from shore to shore. Brilliant.

GitHub for Mac isn’t the first application to give Git a UI on the Macintosh but it is the first that came from the guys behind GitHub and that alone will be enough to make many people make the jump. It also helps that the application is very good. If they work as feverishly to keep GitHub for Mac up-to-date as they do all of their other services I think everyone will look back at this app’s launch as a major point in the company’s already incredible story.

Tron Legacy Terminal style for Mac OS X

Every since seeing Tron Legacy I’ve wanted Flynn’s computer. From what I’ve heard on the Interwebs it runs Sun Solaris. Since I’m a Mac guy maybe I can have my Terminal look like The Grid’s UI without needing to run an entirely different OS.

I’m basing this style solely off of this screenshot from the Tron Legacy movie trailer. Here is what my Terminal looks like now.

There is still more to do. First, I have to find the font that they are using (font experts, help?). If you want to contribute to this I’ve put the style up on GitHub.