Many of us use Github daily however we usually don't use all its features. On the latest months, its team released a few webinars about how Github uses Github. More than showing the web interface, they talked about their culture and their workflows. In this post, I'm adding the links to the webinars with a few notes.
Communicating with Issues
- They don’t send email internally and they use repositories for everything
- They have 688 people and 829 teams - the concept of team here is: by organizational team, by project, by affinity and by location
- Their projects always have:
README.md,CONTRIBUTING.md,ROADMAP.md,ISSUE_TEMPLATE.mdandPULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md - In PRs they include a TL,DR (I also do this)
- It is possible to create accordions / dropdown in Markdown - example
Communicating with remote teams
- “Remote” is not a good word and they prefer using the term “Distributed” - which I also like. Like Thinkific, they have weekly radars and team stand-ups. It is interesting to mention they use their own Github to handle projects, instead of using a project-specific tool like Jira or Asana. Even their one-on-ones are stored in repositories
- They mentioned Hubot - a bot system with several plugins
- For video calls, they use zoom - for all meetings they book they also add a zoom link (we kind of do the same with Google Meet)
Managing your teams
- They show the project's functionality inside Github. It is a Kanban/Trello style project tool with the advantage of being integrated with Github. To be honest, I never noticed the Project feature but after this webinar, I started using in a pet-project
- They show Probot - it’s an open-source bot created by GH employees
- They show Task Lists (markdown trick)
Managing your projects
- This one covers pretty much the project feature that Github offers (similar to the previous one). It is cool because projects are connected to the repo and they show how to use Issues, PRs and Milestones together. For one moment I thought why we don’t use Github in the company but I remembered how much would cost per user so I am not sure if it is a good idea.
- Github has saved replies that can be used in PR’s and Issues. Pretty handy.
Writing documentation for your projects
- They show Read the Docs
- They remember that documentation is part of a process, don't give this to only one person.
- They share some thoughts about how to write good documentation.
If you like my notes you may want to watch the videos :)
Top comments (6)
Wow, thanks for putting this together. Super interesting and really cool that they get to dogfood so naturally.
Thanks for putting this together. I had read about a handful of these things when GitHub announced them, but this is such a great refresher. The part about including a TLDR in all pull requests is something we could work on.
Also, I want to get better at writing documentation for projects. It seems like it's always one of the first things we neglect and if not, it's the last thing on the list. Making it part of the process seems like a win-win. You document things properly and it pays off down the road, much when you least expect it. Having the documentation ready when someone new joins the team means much less time wasted trying to remember what's what.
We never prioritize documentation and especially the last talk shows how relevant is keeping a good documentation in the project. It is something that we need to practice :)
Hi Leonardo,
Im building this directory of technical webinars and am indeed missing something on git (GitHub). Are you still developing these webinars? Either way feel free to reach me in order to showcase them :)
Thanks for sharing this!
I didn't know about Github Projects. This is very possibly the greatest thing. Now, I will use GitHub for organizing my entire life. Thanks for putting this list together!