Social Coding

GitHub is so successful because, it makes collaboration with others easy. Successful collaboration between people makes (software) projects themselves a success.

Code is about the people writing it. We focus on lowering the barriers of collaboration by building powerful features into our products that make it easier to contribute. The tools we create help individuals and companies, public and private, to write better code, faster.

The GitHub old mission statement

Chris Wanstrath, one of the GitHub founders, gave a great talk (60 min.) at the Esri User Conference 2014 about GitHub and open source in general. Recommended watch.

After viewing the video, "watch" a couple of repositories and "follow" some people to stay updated. Explore users profiles to see what people are working on and connect with those who use similar software or do work related to your own.

Bootcamp articles:

• Be social

Further reading on social coding:

• Social coding -- the next wave in development (TechRepublic)
• Eclipse wiki and FAQ

If I work on my own, do I still need GitHub?

Yes! See it as a backup solution, but Git improves your workflow, it encourages you to wander off with new ideas (branches), switch between them, and even merge them. And GitHub is simply a great Git user interface. Friends and colleagues can follow your work on GitHub and become collaborators.

With Git (or any VCS), you work in plain text files and keep code and documentation closely together. This ensures that anybody can understand what is going on in one week, one month, or one year.