kneath

(This is the text of the keynote I gave at Startup Riot 2009. Will update when video becomes available.)

Hi everyone, I'm Chris Wanstrath, and I'm one of the co-founders of GitHub.

GitHub, if you haven't heard of it, has been described as "Facebook for developers." Which is great when talking about GitHub as a website, but not so great when describing GitHub as a business. In fact, I think we're the polar opposite of Facebook as a business: we're small, never took investment, and actually make money. Some have even called us successful.

Which I've always wondered about. Success is very vague, right? Probably even relative. How do you define it?

After thinking for a while I came up with two criteria. The first is profitability. We employ four people full time, one person part time, have thousands of paying customers, and are still growing. In fact, our rate of growth is increasing - which means January was our best month so far, and February is looking pretty damn good.

kneath

GitHub Javascript Strategy

Unless otherwise necessary (such as mobile development), the GitHub javascript codebase is based off jQuery. You can safely assume it will be included on every page.

File naming

• All jquery plugins should be prefixed with jquery, such as jquery.facebox
• All github-specific jquery plugins should be prefixed with jquery.github. Like jquery.github.repo_list.js
• All page-specific files (that only run on ONE page) should be prefixed with page. page.billing.js

kneath

describe 'Bacon and Mocha sucks together' do
  it "sucks when you have a spec using only mocha, not bacon, to assert something" do
    str = 'a'
    str.expects(:size)
    str.size
  end 
end

# this raises Bacon::Error: empty specification
# after spending 20 minutes trying to fix I decided to just add 

kneath

// Examples:
// 
//    button_to "Mark as unread", mark_as_unread_message_path(message), :method => :put, :class => "form_to_link"
//    button_to "New Alert", new_alert
//    
jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
  jQuery('.form_to_link').each(function(el){
    var form = el.parents('form');
    form.after('<a href="' + form.attr('action') + '" class="button_link_to">' + form_to_link.attr('value') + '</a>');
    form.hide();