The Value of A Learning Culture
Entrepreneurship Journal Day9: Lessons from GitHub’s history and the learning culture at London App Brewery
After the last few days of journalling on Medium, a writer friend of mine counselled me out of concern for my OCD to write long form articles, and challenge me to write shorter!
There is an ancient Chinese saying,
“Walking among any three people, there must be teachers of mine. Choose the good and follow, take the bad and change it.”
In the spirit of learning, let me try and compose a short journal entry today. Thank you, you know who you are =)
GitHub, the Octoverse
My journey to learn app coding has been truly fun and rewarding so far. 9 apps in 5 days. That would indeed seem impossibly fast for a beginner if not for GitHub.
What is GitHub? A code and knowledge sharing facility, almost like Dropbox, but tailored for software development.
For my app coding course with the London App Brewery, GitHub has enabled the course instructor to share her code and projects easily, and that has meant dramatically faster teaching and learning.
Expand this from an online classroom to the global development community, and you get a turbocharged learning culture through GitHub, which goes on to afford the world many of its supersized tech companies under the age of 20 today.
- Interesting stats about GitHub: hosts 100+ million repositories (folders), used by 40+ million users, in 200+ countries. No.1 user outside US is China by a large margin. ~50% Fortune 500 companies are its clients.
- Interesting history: Founded in 2008 in San Fran. Currently 12 years old. Bootstrapped for the first 4 years through extraordinary demand and growth. Acquired in 2018 by Microsoft for $7.5 billion, at 30x its then annual recurring revenue.
- Fun thing to discover: Mybridge shared this Medium article about 21 amazing iOS apps, which openly share their entire code base on GitHub.
- Fun thing to do: Clone the FlappySwift project, to see the code behind the popular game FlappyBird and play it on your computer. Took me a whole 5 minutes to get my first point, good thing I quit my gaming career early!
- The logo now known as the Octocat, was once an Octopuss, named by and bought from an iStock graphic designer. The GitHub user community is known as the Octoverse.
How to create a learning culture for yourself and around you?
This is perhaps best summed up by Angela Yu, our app coding course instructor at the London App Brewery.
Have I mentioned she is incredibly human-centred and a really valuable human? I have. And here are more of her wise words I love. Hope you love it too.
“… with new developments, new technologies. … it’s really tough to get on top of things… This is something we thought of really carefully when we set up our company, when we started employing people. Because it’s really important to get the company culture right from the beginning. And it was my decision that everybody who works at our company is entitled to one hour, and not just any one hour, but your best one hour, that’s first thing in the morning from 9 o’clock to 10 o’clock, that hour is blocked out for learning. And it doesn’t matter what you want to learn … as long as it is something you want to learn, you can dedicate that hour of prime brain time to it. …
A lot of running a company is about finding really smart people who wanna work for you, and keeping those smart people around. And smart people tend to have a need to learn stuff. … This is something really fundamental and important to our company … and every employee no matter how important or how senior they are get this privilege.
So what I recommend for you is if you can, try to spend an hour of your best brain time, at least an hour every day to learn something new, it doesn’t even have to be programming related. … The main point is to choose when you learn. (ie. Dedicate your best hour.)”
