Why everything should have a URL
When knowledge lives in people's heads and inboxes, it doesn't scale. Giving decisions and processes URLs makes context discoverable, async, and opt-in.
159 posts
When knowledge lives in people's heads and inboxes, it doesn't scale. Giving decisions and processes URLs makes context discoverable, async, and opt-in.
Async is what makes remote work actually work. It produces better outcomes, improves work-life balance, and unlocks flow beyond Cold War-era workflows.
Open source isn't a fad. Here are twenty-five economic, moral, and personal reasons your organization should embrace it.
Great leaders don't just communicate decisions—they explain how and why. Without that context, every decision sounds like "because I said so."
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?
Most meetings are just information downloads that could've been a doc. Treat them as an escalation based on complexity, not the default starting point.
What if we applied open source's cathedral vs. bazaar metaphor to management? Cathedral managers control; bazaar managers empower.
Like Toyota's andon cord, transparent collaboration lets anyone stop the line when they spot a problem in knowledge work.
Async communication is like gzip compression for humans—more upfront processing, but greater throughput with fewer packets.
Announcing noagendanomeeting.net — a single-page site advocating that every meeting deserves an agenda, and most meetings deserve to be a document instead.
AI coding agents aren't replacing developers — they're extending the transparency, code review, and collaboration patterns behind open source.
When I joined GitHub in 2013, I found a company that had rethought how work happens. Thirteen years later, those lessons are more relevant than ever.
Set up LanguageTool as a free, open-source Grammarly alternative that runs locally on your Mac. No subscription required.
Silencing dissent erodes trust, invites negativity, and stifles learning. The best leaders embrace transparency instead.
What if we applied open source's cathedral vs. bazaar metaphor to management? Cathedral managers control; bazaar managers empower.
How GitHub turned its guiding communication principles into prescriptive practices to manage internal signal-to-noise ratio.
Like Toyota's andon cord, transparent collaboration lets anyone stop the line when they spot a problem in knowledge work.
Async communication is like gzip compression for humans—more upfront processing, but greater throughput with fewer packets.
Pull requests capture not just what changed, but who, why, and what alternatives were considered. Treat every PR as a time capsule for future contributors.
Small scheduling choices — writing dates unambiguously, including time zones, and building in breaks — make distributed teams feel included.
Most meetings are just information downloads that could've been a doc. Treat them as an escalation based on complexity, not the default starting point.
GitHub isn't just for developers. A practical guide for non-technical roles to follow along, collaborate, and track work with confidence.
A battle-tested template for handing off your responsibilities before extended leave, so your team stays unblocked and nothing falls through the cracks.
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 build 404 pages for Jekyll and GitHub Pages that automatically suggest similar URLs to those requested, using Levenshtein distance and your sitemap.
Async is what makes remote work actually work. It produces better outcomes, improves work-life balance, and unlocks flow beyond Cold War-era workflows.
Seven core responsibilities that define the corporate Chief of Staff role, from tactical office management to strategic advising.
Great leaders don't just communicate decisions—they explain how and why. Without that context, every decision sounds like "because I said so."
A customizable GitHub Actions 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 network setup for easier maintenance, treating my Raspberry Pi like cattle, not a pet.
A four-part series on managing open source at scale: setting contributors up for success, automating workflows, governance, and moderation.
Keep open source discussions productive with codes of conduct, community reporting, and tiered moderation tools to de-escalate conflict.
Practical tips for governing your growing open source project, from org-owned repos and enforcing 2FA to the triage role and appointing community managers.
What a Technical Program Manager actually does day-to-day, from a Product Manager who found the responsibilities were already familiar.
Reflecting on eight years at GitHub, from GeoJSON rendering and GitHub Pages to trust and safety, open source licensing, and 200,000 words of blogging.
Your unofficial reading list for understanding GitHub's async-by-default culture, communication norms, and what it's actually like to be a GitHubber.
A data-driven snapshot of 1,121 federal .gov domains ahead of the Biden administration, covering HTTPS adoption, CMS usage, open source, and more.
How I used a UniFi Dream Machine, VLANs, Pi-Hole, cloudflared, and Cloudflare Gateway to over-optimize my network for privacy, security, and ad blocking.
Celebrating 10 years and nearly 200,000 words of blogging with a countdown of the most viewed posts, from open source licensing to communicating at GitHub.
Trust and safety is a cost of doing business on the internet. If you're building a platform, budget for abuse protection before someone gets hurt.
My system for staying on top of 200+ daily GitHub notifications without losing focus. Watch liberally, unsubscribe often, and triage by signal.
How I choose communication tools at GitHub, from issues to Slack and Zoom, and why the tool you pick matters as much as what you say.
Never force a human to do what a computer can. How to automate code review, issue triage, and maintainer workflows to scale your open source community.
Seven practical ways to set contributors up for success before they open their first issue, from the contributor funnel to being responsive.
Tools alone won't make remote work succeed. Eight cultural rules for effective async communication, regardless of your industry or role.
Why GitHub's approach to user blocking diverges from other social networks, and what's different about moderating a code collaboration platform.
What GitHub's Community and Safety team learned building a trust and safety framework to help maintainers grow healthy, open source communities.
Four resolutions for being a better open source community member, from reducing your bus factor to being a gracious dinner party host to your contributors.
My OSCON 2019 talk on GitHub's approach to empowering maintainers to grow safe, welcoming open source communities that scale alongside the code.
A three-phase approach for product managers joining established teams: tackle known wins, build a shared vision, then discover how to get there.
How lawyers can adopt the workflows, tools, and philosophies of open source to make their legal practice more remote-friendly
The most valuable thing a product manager can do is frame the right problem for the right user before anyone writes a line of code.
When responding to customer feature requests your answer should be in the form of "we're doing that", "we're not doing that", or "we might do that".
CLAs create a hostile developer experience, require significant overhead, and are usually unnecessary given modern open source norms.
There's lots of internet lore around open source licensing. An attorney and open source developer answers the most common questions.
Publishing code isn't enough. Twelve practical tips to attract users, welcome contributors, and grow a healthy open source community.
The hardest part of software development is not coming up with features to build, but instead, deciding what features will have the biggest impact.
The best developers don't just write code. They over-communicate, ship the smallest delta, and optimize for users over maintainability.
Your README doesn't just communicate the "what" and "how"—it communicates the "why" and fights scope creep and technical debt.
Use GitHub's protected branches to grant collaborators moderator permissions without the ability to merge pull requests or push to master.
Small gestures—recognizing birthdays, work anniversaries, and life milestones—go a long way, especially when there's no water cooler.
A bikeshed honeypot is an obvious flaw you plant in a proposal to divert attention from the parts you feel strongly about.
A detailed look at the packages, prose linters, and configuration tweaks I use to turn the Atom text editor into a powerful Markdown writing environment.
Tips I share with every new GitHubber — from shipping something in your first two weeks to pushing through the inevitable overwhelm.
Seven traits I've observed in successful GitHubbers over the years, from shipping early and often to the appreciation economy.
Great products absorb complexity on behalf of users, not the other way around. 10 principles for building software that's complex to build and easy to use.
Unless absolutely required, avoid custom, modified, or non-standard open source licenses, which will serve as a barrier to downstream use of your code.
Features aren't free. Every time you remove one that doesn't serve your core use case, you're adding an implicit feature that does.
A curated reading list for developers who care about more than just code, covering technology, open source culture, and the business of software.
What does a product manager actually do all day? After six months of note-taking, here are 12 responsibilities from user advocacy to strategic thinking.
Ground rules, assigned roles, and clear timelines keep controversial pull requests from devolving into the internet's comments section.
Requiring the world's largest code producer to open source only 20% is a lost opportunity. A three-year pilot won't yield results we don't already know.
Stop optimizing for power users and edge cases. The real challenge is nailing the out-of-box experience for 80% of users.
How a WWII field manual can help modern knowledge workers identify those inadvertently sabotaging your organization today.
Not all pull requests are equal. Six distinct strategies for using pull requests on GitHub, from quick heads-ups to deep reviews.
Open source is like Yelp for software, with the potential to shift the balance of power from publishers to consumers.
Open source isn't a fad. Here are twenty-five economic, moral, and personal reasons your organization should embrace it.
The best collaboration tools share four traits: open, linkable, asynchronous, and process-capturing. Are you working the way you'd like?
When knowledge lives in people's heads and inboxes, it doesn't scale. Giving decisions and processes URLs makes context discoverable, async, and opt-in.
Change aversion, lack of technocratic leadership, and heavyweight processes bred by distrust keep government IT 5-10 years behind the private sector
You don't have to share your code to benefit from open source. Adopting open source workflows behind the firewall produces more modern software regardless.
Add an edit button to your GitHub Pages site and invite readers to collaborate on your content — it's just one predictable URL.
Instead of relying on editors to catch marketing speak, use automated tests and CI to enforce voice, tone, and style guidelines on your corporate blog.
Nearly three years later, the founding principles of project MyGov remain valid guideposts for any reform effort in government.
Call it taste, culture, or zen — every organization has shared assumptions that guide decisions and resolve ambiguity in pursuit of its mission.
Your users don't care how excited you are about your new feature. Twelve rules for writing corporate blog posts that sound human.
Government agencies should buy pull requests that fix specific issues, not generic developer hours. Treat contractors as contributors.
Reviewing pull requests in weekly committee meetings kills open source projects. Decentralize governance and reduce information imbalance.
A step-by-step guide to creating a branded, customizable developer portal for your organization's open source projects using GitHub Pages and Jekyll.
Who holds the copyright? What year do you use? Do you even need a notice? Everything you need to know about open source copyright.
Treat content as code and unlock CI for prose. Use HTML Proofer and Travis CI to automatically test every link, image, and change.
A data-driven look at federal .gov domains: only 25% enforce HTTPS, 87% have no detectable CMS, and dozens still run decade-old servers.
Eight lessons from scaling GitHub Pages from a 100-line shell script to a full OAuth app handling 250K requests per minute.
18F and USDS both aim to modernize government technology, but with divergent approaches: one ships culture, the other ships confidence.
Government agencies struggle to attract developers due to outdated tools, distrusted employees, and a culture that optimizes for process over innovation.
Publishing code isn't enough — open source means building communities. Five best practices for engaging contributors and growing your project.
You can't foster open source publicly while running a closed-source culture internally. Five best practices for internal collaboration.
Jekyll collections extend posts and pages to support non-dated but related content -- like team members, products, or recipes.
Your agency's first open source project is set up to fail. Start small and build organizational muscle memory before going public.
Word Diff automatically converts Word documents to Markdown when you commit to GitHub, so they can be diffed, versioned, and collaborated on like code.
Every organization is optimized for one thing. A glance at someone's laptop stickers reveals whether yours optimizes for people or process.
Government agencies can't agree to your standard terms of service. Here's why, and how to negotiate federal-compatible TOS.
14 open source apps I built to help non-technical users collaborate on GitHub, from Word-to-Markdown conversion to simplified issue forms.
HTTPS protects more than passwords and credit cards. It prevents censorship by making selective content blocking impossible.
In government IT, change depends on geeks and suits -- yet despite being in an industry built on communication, they rarely talk.
Government IT is held back less by law and more by myth -- decade-old assumptions about technology that calcified into policy.
The White House Open Source Policy should prefer existing platforms, build real communities, and share code as widely as possible.
How GitHub uses issues and chat for async communication — fifteen rules that eliminate the 'you had to be there' problem in corporate workflows.
What a GitHub Government Evangelist does: help agencies ship software better and bring Silicon Valley practices to Washington.
Federal IT policy needs to move past cold-war-era workflows and alphabet-soup compliance toward a culture of openness.
Eight reasons government contractors should embrace open source — from free advertising and better code to attracting top talent.
What government lawyers need to know about open source licensing — from MIT to GPL, consuming, publishing, and accepting contributions.
Every decision deserves its own URL — one that captures what was decided, who made the call, and why. Give your content a permanent home.
Publishing code without fostering community isn't open source — it's disclosed source. True open source is a two-way relationship.
Government delivers multi-million dollar software projects on CD-ROMs in triplicate. Modern development practices demand better.
Open source software isn't inherently less secure than proprietary alternatives. That myth stems from fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD).
Three lessons from moving from the federal government to GitHub: trust, happiness, and treating relationships as assets.
From enterprise FUD to closed-source contractors to a culture of no, an entire value chain keeps taxpayer-funded code behind the firewall.
FedRAMP was supposed to make cloud adoption easier for federal agencies. Instead, it's making it harder to keep pace with the private sector.
Revisiting 1,229 federal .gov domains three years later to measure SSL, IPv6, CMS adoption, and open data compliance. The results are decidedly mixed.
How to evaluate an open source project's health — from update frequency to community engagement — before you depend on it.
Technology enables government to move beyond transparency to true collaboration. Here's why that shift matters.
How we consume content has changed dramatically, yet how we author it hasn't. Markdown forces you to write for the web.
Parachuting technologists into agencies isn't enough. Government innovation requires building a culture that values technology.
Add GitHub-style hover anchor links to your Jekyll headings with CSS and JavaScript so readers can deep-link to any section.
Open source has always been about the right to modify, not contribute. As those workflows spread beyond software, we may need a new word.
Next time you publish a data source, ask one question: how can you optimize the experience for the data consumer?
Stop publishing monolithic datasets. Treat your GitHub repo like a RESTful API — granular, URL-addressable, and optimized for consumers.
Choosing Jekyll over a traditional CMS for government.github.com freed us to spend six months iterating on what mattered most — the content.
The challenges we faced were overwhelmingly administrative, cultural and bureaucratic in nature. Here are 10 things I know now I wish I had known then.
Developers learned decades ago that version control and collaboration are essential. It's time we apply those same practices to data.
Friction — the time between wanting to contribute and actually contributing — is the only metric that matters for open source.
Code is just one way to contribute to open source. Projects thrive when they create clear paths for non-technical contributors to participate.
On the internet, simple and open formats always win. From HTTP to JSON to Markdown, the lightweight underdog consistently beats its proprietary rival.
In government IT, technology is never the hard part. Culture is. Stop building new tools and start sustaining the ones you already have.
A step-by-step guide to converting ESRI Shapefiles to GeoJSON for rendering as interactive maps on GitHub, plus why open formats matter for public data.
Government CIOs don't need bigger budgets or more staff. They need to build lean, iterate quickly, and embrace open source as a way of working.
Demanding agencies release code misses the point. Open source is a culture and workflow, not a deliverable. Fix the process and the code follows.
Tech consultants who define themselves by a single language or framework are like a store that sells one product. Customers bring problems, not solutions.
Want to predict the next technology trend? Look at how open source developers work. The tools they build for themselves today become mainstream tomorrow.
In DC, 'hacker' is a dirty word. But the hacker ethic — sharing, openness, decentralization — is the mindset government needs to solve hard problems.
Federal agencies spend billions on IT security, yet rigid compliance frameworks create false safety while stifling innovation against real threats.
Open source communities ship code across geographies and timezones without managers. Their collaborative practices have lessons for all of us.
The internet naturally converges on elegant standards. For WordPress to keep up with modern CMSs, it needs to expose all content through a RESTful API.
If the internet is the primary medium by which content is consumed, shouldn't that be the primary medium for which content is prepared?
Open source, at its core, is actually not about code, but about connecting people around a shared vision to encourage collaborative problem solving.
Jekyll (and other static-sites) lead to simple, flexible, and reliable websites that allow for a renewed focus on what actually matters: the content.
The question isn't whether government code should be public domain or open source. It's how the open source community can help agencies get there.
Google retired iGoogle. Startups favor activity feeds and minimal interfaces. The drag-and-drop dashboard era is over, and simplicity is the new default.
When nobody will see your code, you cut corners. Writing as if it were open source produces more flexible, modular, and maintainable software from day one.
Publishing government data isn't as simple as pressing publish. Ten steps to building APIs and ecosystems developers actually use.
A presentation on how teams use WordPress beyond publishing, from collaborative document editing to progress tracking and workflow integration.
80% of enterprise uses open source; 2/3 contribute code upstream; and 1 in 4 have detrimental open source policy.
CFPB accepted the first citizen-submitted pull request in federal government history — a two-word typo fix that set a historic precedent.
CFPB's open-source policy nails code procurement and publishing, but misses the secret sauce of actively participating in the open-source community.
WordPress outperforms Drupal on paper, yet Drupal powers twice as many federal .govs as every other CMS combined. It's a perception problem.
PHP's bad security reputation in government and enterprise is largely FUD, outdated assumptions, and confusing popularity with vulnerability.
Wired found GitHub too complex for newsrooms. What if WordPress could offer the same fork-and-merge collaboration model with its signature simplicity?
A collaboratively maintained list of open-source alternatives to proprietary enterprise software, from the UK's procurement toolkit on GitHub.
Federal IT spends billions annually, yet fewer than 9% of projects ship on time and on budget. The fix requires regulatory reform and agile.
Government's biggest IT challenge isn't technology, it's culture. Agile adoption requires rethinking risk aversion, incentives, and rigid waterfall habits.
Top tech talent doesn't need perks or a Silicon Valley zip code. They want the chance to change the world, and your bureaucracy is standing in the way.
WP Document Revisions now integrates with Edit Flow, adding email notifications, custom metadata, team chat, and calendar views to your document workflow.
A scan of every federal executive .gov reveals that only 73% are live, Drupal dominates as a CMS, and 93% of live domains use no detectable CMS at all.
The case for WordPress as the world's most versatile publishing platform, from its proven track record and ease of use to its community-driven ecosystem.
Open source won't win the enterprise by being better. The community must match proprietary software's polish and professionalism to be taken seriously.
Open-source document management and version control for WordPress. Collaboratively edit files of any format and track workflow progress.
WordPress can do SharePoint better than SharePoint. A proposal to build document management and version control on top of WordPress's proven core.