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If you’ve built, written or created something new, talk about it publicly more than just once. You don’t need to go overboard, but people generally want to know what you’re doing, want to support what’s new, and sometime miss things. 👏 It’s cool to be proud of what you’ve done. — Zach Holman (@holman) August 7, 2018 The smaller you are, be it scrappy startup or just someone doing something solo o

Programming time, dates, timezones, recurring events, leap seconds... everything is pretty terrible. The common refrain in the industry is Just use UTC! Just use UTC! And that's correct... sort of. But if you're stuck building software that deals with time, there's so much more to consider. It's time... to talk about time. (Also it's time for a lot of time-related puns. Please prepare yourself acc

I have a long history with JavaScript, dating back to the glory days of the most perfect technology ever to have graced computers: DHTML. DHTML was totally rad, like how the Budweiser frogs were rad. In the late 90’s you really couldn’t do much of anything on the web except add 88x31 buttons and build with 1x1.gif spacer tricks. But then Dynamic HTML came out in IE4 and a whole world of hover anim

How can we fix the firing process if we're not even talking about it first? So it’s been a little over a year since GitHub fired me. I initially made a vague tweet about leaving the company, and then a few weeks later I wrote Fired, which made it pretty clear that leaving the company was involuntary. The reaction to that post was pretty interesting. It hit 100,000 page views within the first few d

Make your team’s deploys as boring as hell and stop stressing about it. Let's talk deployment Whenever you make a change to your codebase, there's always going to be a risk that you're about to break something. No one likes downtime, no one likes cranky users, and no one enjoys angry managers. So the act of deploying new code to production tends to be a pretty stressful process. It doesn't have to

Silicon Valley is full of startups who fetishize the candidate that comes into the interview, answers a few clever fantasy coding challenges, and ultimately ends up the award-winning hire that will surely implement the elusive algorithm that will herald a new era of profitability for the fledging VC-backed company. Startup: We’re hiring people to reinvent and change the world! Interviewer: Please

Yeah! We’re remote friendly! We got Bob who lives in San Diego, we’re based in San Francisco, and we have a Slack room, and people usually can come in to work at ANY time (between 8am and 9am), but really fuck Bob he’s kind of a loner and we’re going to probably let him go soon anyway, but yeah you can totes work remote! We’re kind of in the surly teenager phase of remote work right now. A lot of

In 2012, I wrote a post titled Abusing Emoji in iOS and Your Mac 👑💩. People seemed to like it, since I saw a lot more wifi networks and Macs on the network whose names consisted of emoji. If that’s not progress for our society, I don’t know what is. After all my talks over the years, I somehow had never given a lightning talk until last night at SydPHP’s meetup in Sydney. I knew I needed to go b

So I got fired from GitHub two weeks ago. This is the tweet I wrote afterwards while walking to lunch: The last half-decade meant everything to me. Was a hell of a gig. Thanks, GitHub. — Zach Holman (@holman) February 20, 2015 I left it ambiguous because I wasn’t sure what to think about it all at that point. I mean, something I’d been doing for half a decade was suddenly gone. If people knew what

You may have heard that we use GitHub to build GitHub. But our company isn’t built on just code: there’s strategy and HR policies and internal communications and a multitude of other documents that need to get written, too. All of which we can use GitHub to write as well. Now, we’re a bit of an oddball company. You’ll have a tough time finding another organization with so many lawyers who know Git

I gave the closing keynote at the Future of Web Apps in London this October, 2014. This is that talk. The slides and the full video of the talk are directly below. If you're interested in a text accompaniment, read on for the high-level overview. moving fast and breaking things Let's start with the classic Facebook quote, Move fast and break things. Facebook's used that for years: it's a philosoph

The GitHub UI is great if you want to see which issues are assigned to you, or for planning out your next milestone iteration, or if you’re optimizing :zzz:zzzzzzzzzz god i’m already bored talking about all this work stuff. Let’s find out how many open source projects have a label named ¯\_(ツ)_/¯: Okay, there’s only one. But there are two with a label of ಠ_ಠ. This opens up a world of opportunity f

Most people are scared to present at a conference, or a meetup, or at a company meeting. Public speaking is a common fear, and many find themselves at night waking up from nightmares involving a disastrous speech. All too often, people think public speaking is something to be afraid of. THEY”RE TOTALLY RIGHT OH MY GOD PUBLIC SPEAKING IS ONE OF THE MOST STRESSFUL THINGS YOURE EVER GOING TO DO PLEAS

I’ve done a lot of posts and talks about how we work together at GitHub. The high-level discussion about how we manage to operate without managers in a 60% remote, 240-employee company is pretty interesting to me. Just like code, though, sometimes the high-level is too high-level. Just show me the code, dammit. Sure, you work asynchronously, but what does that actually mean? So, here’s a look at m

Please sign my guestbook. Have you ever shoved a <blink> into a <marquee> tag? Pixar gets all the accolades today, but in the 90s this was a serious feat of computer animation. By combining these two tags, you were a trailblazer. A person capable of great innovation. A human being that all other human beings could aspire to. You were a web developer in the 1990s. With that status, you knew you wer

Too many startups do this thing where they build their reputation with all these great technical blog posts and fascinating public talks, and then they become a Real Company and suddenly decide they’re too cool to be open and transparent. Maybe the lawyers get to them, or maybe all the cool ninja rockstars become managers. In any case, I think that’s stupid. I don’t want GitHub to be one of those

This is the brand-new, action-packed sequel to the original Git and GitHub Secrets talk I did in 2012. For one, it has more emoji. Git is a really powerful tool. A lot of that power is deeply hidden, and for good reason: it may only be valuable in certain use cases. You may not run into those use cases very often, but when you do, these lesser-known features might save you literally seconds of tim

Tech companies do a generally poor job at keeping employees from leaving. There are plenty of reasons for this: competing offers, unhappiness, and just generally itchy feet. Because of this, sometimes it’s difficult to focus on building a strong culture of company solidarity, particularly when you’re trying to juggle the hundreds of other needs of a growing business. This is a talk about keeping p

In the beginning of 2013, we shipped a new version of Search to GitHub.com. This talk takes a peek behind the scenes to illustrate how we build features at GitHub. It’s a good beginner-level look at how startups work in teams together and deploy a product to the general public (initially this talk was given at a university). Slides

Quick Insightful Tip: There should be a little lady with her arms in the air between these two brackets: [🙆]. If your machine doesn't display that, well, this post probably wouldn't make sense to you anyway. Just imagine I'm discussing an impending dolphin takeover scenario. You may want to make sure you're on Safari; Chrome doesn't appear to appreciate emoji like the rest of us. Like most fourte

GitHub’s been through a lot of growth the past five years. Expanding to two million users and almost seven million repositories can push the limits of how we interact with a tool like Git (which wasn’t at all designed to work at scale like this). This talk is about the systems we’ve built to handle that growth. Starting from a local Git architecture, migrating to a networked backend setup, then op

We tuck a lot of features away on github.com. Sometimes the UI just hasn’t been fleshed out. Or we have bigger plans in mind for the feature in the future. Or it just hasn’t been finished yet. But we still want to give you the flexibility of using that feature today. The same can be said about Git. If you’ve ever looked at the manpages, there’s feature after feature and option after option in its

For a large part of the last year of my life I’ve had the good fortune of being able to speak and attend a number of technology conferences. Big, small, corporate, indie, local, international… conferences come in so many delightful forms. Conferences can be a lot of fun, but they can also be mentally and physically exhausting. Here’s what I’ve learned. Connect with a local Some people you meet are

▁▂▃▅▂▇ in your shell. View the Project on GitHub holman/spark Download ZIP File Download TAR Ball View On GitHub spark sparklines for your shell See? Here's a graph of your productivity gains after using spark: ▁▂▃▅▇ install spark is a shell script, so drop it somewhere and make sure it's added to your $PATH. It's helpful if you have a super-neat collection of dotfiles, like mine. If you're on OS

There are a few specific things we’ve done at GitHub to help our maintainability and reliability of our Ruby apps. Focusing on improving documentation, optimizing the first-run experience, splitting out our API as Sinatra apps, and being careful about how we ship impacting infrastructure changes has helped us out dramatically. Slides