By naturally capturing and exposing process and sharing it as widely as is appropriate for the subject matter, URLs render organizational context time and location agnostic allowing knowledge to move more freely within an organization on an asynchronous, discoverable, and opt-in basis.
Asynchronous work allows for remote work that's enjoyable and that actually works. Async increases inclusivity, produces better outcomes faster, encourages discoverability and permanence of context, creates space for learning, shifts knowledge workers to higher value work, improves work-life balance, empowers distributed teams, and enables parallelization and flow.
Twenty five microeconomic, macroeconomic, moral, transparency, participatory, and personal motivations why you and your organization should consume, publish, contribute to, and support open source.
Absent working within systems that naturally capture and expose process, transparency takes effort. Leaders should hold one another accountable for spending the additional cycles to show their work through communicating not only what decision was made, but also how the decision was made, and why.
If issues, pull requests, and project boards are the best way to develop software, should they not also be the best way to manage software development?
Default to transferring context asynchronously. Hold colleagues accountable for being async first. If you receive a meeting invite without context, an agenda, or a read-ahead doc, consider politely declining.
The cathedral and the bazaar are two contrasting styles of people management, inspired by the open source movement. The cathedral style is more hierarchical, controlled, and standardized, while the bazaar style is more decentralized, autonomous, and collaborative.
How the andon principle from lean manufacturing can help you spot and solve critical issues early on and foster a culture of transparency and collaboration within the software development process by encouraging anyone to "stop the line" when necessary.
Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about the work and more time doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow.
AI agents that write code, open pull requests, and fix bugs aren't replacing developers — they're extending the same patterns of transparency, code review, and collaboration that have made open source successful for decades.
When I joined GitHub in 2013, I found a company that had fundamentally rethought how work happens. Thirteen years later, the lessons from that experiment are more relevant than ever.
How to set up a free and open-source grammar, style, and spell checker that can be run locally on your machine without sending data to a third-party services like Grammarly, preserving the privacy of what you type.
Leaders often face push back when they make tough decisions. Trying to "control the narrative" by ignoring or shutting down dissent is a bad idea. It erodes trust, invites negativity, and stifles learning. A better approach is to be transparent, open, and accountable. This builds trust, invites positivity, and fosters learning.
The cathedral and the bazaar are two contrasting styles of people management, inspired by the open source movement. The cathedral style is more hierarchical, controlled, and standardized, while the bazaar style is more decentralized, autonomous, and collaborative.
Learn more about how we use GitHub to build GitHub, how we turned our guiding communications principles into prescriptive practices to manage our internal communications signal-to-noise ratio, and how you can contribute to the ongoing conversation.
How the andon principle from lean manufacturing can help you spot and solve critical issues early on and foster a culture of transparency and collaboration within the software development process by encouraging anyone to "stop the line" when necessary.
Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently, because asynchronous communication involves less frequent, but richer communication, meaning there is less time talking about the work and more time doing it, allowing the system to optimize for throughput and flow.
When authoring a pull request, use the body as an opportunity to document the proposed change, especially the "why", and cross link any related issues or other PRs to create a trail of breadcrumbs for future contributors.
When working as a distributed team, be mindful of cultural differences, time zones, encouraging breaks between meetings, and connecting as humans.
Default to transferring context asynchronously. Hold colleagues accountable for being async first. If you receive a meeting invite without context, an agenda, or a read-ahead doc, consider politely declining.
GitHub isn't just for software developers. If you're in a non-technical role, you can use GitHub to follow along, collaborate with your team, track your work, and share information. This brief guide includes everything you need to know to get started confidently with GitHub.
This is the template I use to prepare for an extended leave (or to hand off responsibilities as I transition to a new role).
If issues, pull requests, and project boards are the best way to develop software, should they not also be the best way to manage software development?
How to implement 404 - not found pages for Jekyll and GitHub pages that automatically suggest similar URLs to the one requested based on your site's sitemap.xml.
Asynchronous work allows for remote work that's enjoyable and that actually works. Async increases inclusivity, produces better outcomes faster, encourages discoverability and permanence of context, creates space for learning, shifts knowledge workers to higher value work, improves work-life balance, empowers distributed teams, and enables parallelization and flow.
Chiefs of Staff manage the office of the CXO, improve organization effectiveness, solve problems without regard for organizational boundaries, manage the CXO's portfolio of responsibilities, shape organizational strategy and culture, serve as trusted counsel and advisor to the CXO, and manage the CXO and the organization's relationships and overall brand.
Absent working within systems that naturally capture and expose process, transparency takes effort. Leaders should hold one another accountable for spending the additional cycles to show their work through communicating not only what decision was made, but also how the decision was made, and why.
A customizable GitHub Action workflow that uses cURL, jq, and Twilio to notify you via text message when a web page or API response changes.
How I used Docker Compose, Ansible, and Caddy to re-over-engineer my UniFi Dream Machine, PiHole/AdGuard Home, and Cloudflare-based home network for ease of setup, maintenance, and management.
As open source projects grow, maintainers' most pressing challenges often shift from the technical to the administrative as they transition from managing code to managing a community of contributors.
Successful open source projects create a welcoming community by fostering productive conversations, promoting healthy collaboration, and de-escalating conflict when things get heated or off topic.
As your open source project grows, here are some practical steps you can take to help operationalize common governance decisions.