GitHub as social network
doing stuff, not just hanging out
GitHub is one of my favorite social networks (only behind Twitter). That may seem like an odd statement about a site that facilitates collaboration among coders and hackers, but the focus on “social coding” means that we can do some things more commonly associated with sites such as Facebook or Reddit:
- user profiles, social graphs, and activity streams
- updates on public activity of followed users
- projects
- organizations
- contribution graph (including “streak” tracking)
- Pages (including the ability to publish a blog)
So what does my usage typically look like, apart from the expected things when working on a project (like code pushes or issues)?
First, I try to follow coders I find particularly interesting, or at least who work on interesting projects. That way, their public activity will in my stream. And since “Alice followed Bob” is a public action, my stream will also show me coders who the folks I follow have found interesting.
Second, I “star” projects that seem particularly cool. This bookmarks it for later review as well as helps raise the project’s profile. And if nothing else, it acts as sort of a notice to the people behind the project that other folks think they have something awesome going. Occasionally, I’ll even “watch” a project, but that only happens when I want to know about the intricate details of everything that happens with it. For a while, I forked (made a personal copy) of everything I liked, but that made finding my own stuff unworkable. Now I try only to fork things that could go away, like controversial code, or that I want to hack on.
Third, I try to make at least one public contribution every day. This means opening an issue or pushing code to open source projects. (I wish they’d expand their definition of “contribution”, but at least it’s pushing us to do well by doing good.)
Finally, I plan to use my own GitHub Pages as sort of a place for research documentation. While a I could use the wiki built into every repository to accomplish most of the functionality I want, it simply does not look as nice. Maybe they could integrate the two someday — it would simplify the publishing workflow tremendously.
I haven’t really spent much time with some of the other social features on GitHub, like “networks” (showing the coders working on forks of various projects) as well as other charts, graphs, & visualizations. If I spent more time on “popular” projects than hacking on smaller things, that would probably change, and in the future I expect that it will.
Of course, other social sites for coders exist: Stack Overflow, Coderwall, and Hacker News come to mind first for me, and others certainly have their favorites as well. But GitHub stands out in my mind because it encourages us to produce, not just talk. I’ve finally gotten over my hangups about writing bad code: I know my code is bad, but that’s better than no code, and it gets better the more code I read or people with whom I can collaborate.
