Super Volatile

Krzysztof Szafranek's link blog

Hi, I'm Krzysztof and I make websites.
When I'm not making websites, I read these.
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Feb 17 / 11:05pm

Optimizing for Happiness

Optimizing for Happiness
more on speakerdeck.com

A presentation about github's culture in which yours truly realizes he's not cool enough.

Filed under: github   hiring   workplace  
 
Jan 22 / 10:46pm

The GitHub Job Interview

Here's what you do. You come up with a cool idea of an open-source project. This becomes your company's development sandbox. Candidates are asked to then contribute to the project in some way. You want to see them code? Ask them to develop a module. You want to see them tackle a bug? Ask them to choose one from the bug-list. This works for every aspect of development work. You can design features together. You can gauge their communication skills. You can see how well they handle reviews. You can ask them to document their work and see how well they can write. But above all, you're not taking advantage of anyone, and true developers probably won't mind investing time into an open-source effort.
more on blog.gigantt.com

Interesting idea. It certainly requires more effort than just having few conversations, so I don't see it becoming a standard procedure, but it may be worth trying.

Filed under: github   hiring  
 
Nov 26 / 10:01pm

Apache considered harmful

Enter PhoneGap. The PhoneGap project has been on GitHub for quite a while and already contains an enviable list of contributors. The project has been very successful and the move to Apache is a result of Adobe's recent acquisition of Nitobi, creators of PhoneGap.

By ASF regulations the project must spend time in the "Incubator" even though it has already proven itself as a technology and as a community to the rest of the world. The project requested git as its version control rather than subversion, for obvious reasons. The request was met with some hostility and new pressure has now come down on the CouchDB "experiment".

more on mikealrogers.com

The author argues that Apache Software Foundation is becoming not only irrelevant in the age of Github, but is also actively harmful. ASF aside, I'm becoming concerned that probably a huge majority of open source projects out there rely so much on a single company. Fortunately, distributed nature of git makes it unlikely that the code will disappear even if something goes wrong with Github.

Filed under: apache   github   open source  
 
Aug 28 / 4:28pm

Product design at GitHub

Having the role of “Product Designer” or having a CEO who says they’re going to “focus on product design now” never made much sense to me. Aren’t you hiring smart people who use your product? Don’t you trust your employees? Doesn’t everyone at your company want to make your product better? Doesn’t that make everyone product designers all of the time?
more on warpspire.com

Insight into development and design culture at github.

Filed under: design   github