Open power-crack GitHub development Code

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GitHub:

A shared virtual host service for software code and content projects that use Git version control. It was written by Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-werne with Ruby on Rails.

-Wikipedia

But the service has evolved into a community of open source software development and management, and its dream of opening up has made it possible to virtualize software development. This power is powerful. 1 years after its inception, the company attracted 100,000 users. 2012 GitHub won the a16z 100 million dollar financing, indicating VC confidence in the company. In the same year, GitHub was selected as the top ten technology companies in Forbes ' selection.

GitHub only took less than 4 years to get the number of libraries (repository, historical versions of shared code) to 1 million. By January 2013, GitHub users reached 3 million and the number of libraries reached 4.9 million. And apparently still growing at a faster rate, the number of GitHub libraries has exceeded 10 million by December 2013, with the latest 1 million being implemented within 48 days.

GitHub's users include big-name customers, including Amazon, Twitter, and the White House. Facebook uses GitHub to develop its own vulnerability tracking tool, which LinkedIn uses to maintain its arranges you Know (whom you might know) and Skills & Endorsements (skills and recommendations).

So how did GitHub from a self-proclaimed "amateur project" to the world's most powerful software development tool that added more than 10,000 users a week?

Solve the problem

Speaking of GitHub had to mention Git. This is a version control tool developed by Linux founder Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development. Developers quickly accepted Git because it was faster and stronger than other similar tools. As a result, the perfect Git is considered an upgraded version of other version control software at the time.

and Preston-werner notes that while Git provides the possibility of a troublesome collaboration problem, it is still difficult to collaborate with git, a observation that led to the birth of GitHub-a solution that solves collaboration problems through Git.

And Chris Wanstrath explains this:

At first GitHub was just an amateur project. After a local development conference, Tom Preston-werner and I went to a sports bar and he told me the idea of being a Git hosting site. This place should be able to easily share code and learn git, and be a git hub. We all love git, but there is no acceptable way to share code. So we do this more out of necessity. Tom thought I would be interested in solving the problem, indeed.

GitHub has always been a problem solution, and the success of the site is not just because it solves the initial problem, but because it adds many of its own features to Git's original functionality. This includes forking (copy), pull request (modification of merge requests) and merging (merger). As described in the Gregg Pollack of Code parochial:

Before GitHub, if you want to contribute to an open source project, you have to manually download the project source code, make your own changes locally, create a series of change lists called "Patches", and then email the project maintainers. The maintainer then has to evaluate the patches that may be entirely from strangers, and then decide whether to merge the changes.

By contrast, GitHub's "forking" feature allows users to copy the contents of any public library to their account and modify it based on that. Users can then share these changes to everyone in the library through the pull request. If everyone likes the changes they make, they can incorporate those changes into the original library.

This new process saves a lot of overhead and friction from previous software collaboration and replaces it with seamless, manageable, and scalable solutions where everyone can share or contribute to or expand on a project that is publicly shared on GitHub.

GitHub customers with private accounts and libraries can also use the same functionality within their teams to develop and manage their proprietary code.

Network effect + Market

These features attract the first batch of users and then create a compelling reason for other developers to participate and join. Driven by the network effect, the talented Engineer Center and project library are constantly attracting new users every day.

GitHub's unique advantage is also his strongest growth engine. GitHUb is also driven by network effects and market dynamics. Companies benefit from two unique and multiplier growth drivers: The network effect attracts more people and their code, and the growing code base plays a market role for those who find code for their projects.

The result of this twin growth engine is the establishment of two major assets:

1. The most important and dynamic social network for computer engineers on the Web

2. A large code base for those looking for code material for their projects

These two assets provide a continuing impetus for their own development. New users are constantly being lured through multiple channels: Code search, invitations from existing GITHUB users, or collaboration through open source projects.

GitHub is known as the "code-like Library of Alexandria", as described in Preston-werner:

The network effect is fantastic. Now with the GITHUB standards, everyone can build new projects, and then immediately know where to find the code, how to contribute to development, how to audit the code, how to submit questions to the code base ... The more people who do these things, the more powerful the effect, the more things from this unified, well-known, normative system. And it all happened so fast.

This is the best network effect, the more people on the GitHub, the more projects on GitHub, the greater the value for everyone.

As GitHub has become the de facto standard for many developers and companies, where the greatest programming ideas have been brought together to develop things, GitHub not only promotes it, it also records the process for others to be unsightly. GitHub's files track the user's contribution to the project on the site. Once the user submits the pull request, the project manager evaluates the user's profile as if he were familiar with the resume. If the patch is accepted, the user's file adds an honor.

GitHub's network effect is dynamic, because every new user-whether personal or corporate-is likely to bring in more new users. Once the company has decided to join, it is possible to bring the whole team in, or, conversely, the person who loves GitHub will draw the whole team to the platform.

The net effect also attracts those who want to work with developers on GitHub. Technology marketers and other professionals now use GitHub as a means of reaching out to developers, where everything is open source, information is open source, books are open source, and there are people using platforms as blogging tools. These uses are beyond the scope of the original GitHub use cases, but they help to promote the platform and develop a growing network.

Mouth

In addition to both the network effect and the market drivers, GitHub's growth has benefited partly from word of mouth. To achieve Word-of-mouth marketing is not to increase the "forwarding" and "like" button so simple. On the contrary, good word-of-mouth depends on content, thoughtfulness, problem solving and ease of use--in other words, the product and service experience is the key.

GitHub's word of mouth comes from the surprises and pleasures it brings, and the surprises that come with it are not the things that are said but the ones that are made. It is better to say well than to do well, and to give people a pleasant surprise will make people volunteer for GitHub salt.

Another key driver of word of mouth is "super fans", who not only like products but also the most loyal public supporters or critics who help you through the stage. The key to the reputation of a product or service is that it brings surprises and happiness and helps.

Free value-added

Like Evernote, free value-added is also an important growth factor for GitHub. While the GitHub Collaborative, democratized philosophy of development needs to be free for everyone to use, the founder of GitHub from the very beginning to realize that, by its very nature, the service is money-consuming. As Wanstrath points out:

One thing Tom (Preston-werner) learned in his last start-up, Gravatar, is that the free supply of resource-intensive services is a losing business. Gravatar's image hosting is very traffic-and GitHub managed git needs to save and transmit code, which is also very costly. We need to recoup these costs.

Fortunately, the release of GitHub's free beta has inadvertently come to the free value-added model. Many of GitHub's users initially built their own public or private libraries for free, but over time, more and more people began to use it to manage their own business code.

Then those people started sending emails to GitHub to ask how they should pay for managing their own private libraries. Founders are beginning to realise that they may be able to do more than recoup their costs-and make it into a business. They decided, on the one hand, to continue to provide unlimited public libraries for free, but private libraries would have to pay. Since everyone else wants to give you money, how can you not have the nerve?

GitHub's current pricing model is this: public projects are free, private items are charged, individuals are 7 dollars per month, and organizations are 25 dollars per month. In addition, there are millions of of millions of dollars in enterprise-class services, such as Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, LivingSocial, VMware and Wal-Mart are their customers.

In general, the free value-added model has the problem of not being able to offer attractive reasons for free upgrades to payment. The GitHub free value-added model avoids the problem. If you're eager to use GitHub tools, but don't want people to see your stuff, switching to a pay package becomes a natural choice for companies that want to use GitHub.

Open source Champion

GitHub's collaboration architecture not only makes it easier to work on existing open source projects, but also for new open source projects. Companies and individuals can now open their own previously undisclosed projects and then let people in the community help improve it.

The impact of this change is very large. If a company wants to open a project, it faces the versioning and patching issues mentioned earlier. With limited time and bandwidth, most companies are unwilling to devote the time and resources they need to the opportunities created by open source. With GitHub, it's easier for these companies to open their own projects. Patch management, versioning, and code hosting are all the GitHub.

This has led to a series of high-profile projects open source, including Twitter Bootstrap, Zurb Ink, people in the community can use these things for free, and the project itself has been improved. GitHub provides these companies with a means to give back to the community that they have previously failed to do, thus driving the development of the open source movement in a meaningful way.

Note: This article is compiled from Morgan Brown (excerpt from the substituting Engines:case studies of how today's Most successful startups Unlock extraordinary h), is one of the top ten cases used in the book to illustrate exponential growth.

[This article compiles from: growthhackers.com]