GitHub is the world’s largest hosting service for storing and working with IT-projects, but that’s not all. The resource cooperates nearly 24M developers and more than 100 thousand organizations. Last year 50% of the world’s TOP10 enterprise companies have used GitHub Enterprise, among them Walmart, Apple and General Motors. How can you, as an entrepreneur, use GitHub for your business?
What is the point of Open Source?
Firstly, we should explain why so many people are willing to share their knowledge for free. The Opensource community basis and our ideology on Github is to share in order to get, to invest our knowledge in technology, which then we will also be using. Our employees actively support this idea, so the company regularly adds new useful solutions to its repository.
GitHub’s terminology
If you plan to use GitHub in your work or your outsourcing team use this hosting, you might need to know Github’s slang.
- Git — version control system, saves all changes in the project from the start, with the option to return to any change in the past;
- Stars — similar to likes on Facebook (the more the better);
- Followers — people who signed up for updates.
- Contributors — people who are involved in the project development process;
- Fork — a copy of the public repository on Github;
- Branch — is used to develop separate tasks;
- Merge — the process of infusion one branch to another;
- Commit — record changes to the repository;
- Code review — code validation for compliance with the requirements, objectives and design;
- Pull request — if you’ve changed something in your fork and now you want to add changes to the source repository, you need to make a pull request on the adoption of your changes into the main repository. The repository’s owner may accept or reject such a request.
GitHub as a means of obtaining information
GitHub is a kind of social network for developers, and therefore, you can not only share projects but also follow the news. What could be interesting for you as an entrepreneur: information about the project development, trending technologies and profiles of developers with whom you will cooperate.
Information on the GitHub development
There is about 10 TB of source code on Github. It is the largest hosting service for collaborative IT development, that has 6 million monthly active users. Not everyone takes an active part in development, some users just follow the development of the project, they are interested in. You, as an entrepreneur, also might be interesting to be among the first, who knows about latest changes in projects (of your potential competitors or projects, that you would be glad to look like). Current repositories of trending GitHub projects you can always find here.
Data on the technologies development
393 different programming languages were registered on Github by July 2017. Swiftis developing now most actively, Ruby and PHP are also among the TOP-10.
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For developers subscription on of programming languages' accounts and pages of technologies developers work with, gives the opportunity always to be aware of the latest updates and use the most modern solutions. You as an entrepreneur may use this data to choose an offshore development team - on the company's website you may see, whether it works with most popular technologies.
The developer’s level indicators
Selecting an offshore development team, customers often prefer to look through developers’ CVs in addition to the company’s portfolio. An alternative is to view developers profiles on Github.
Profile of Linus Torvalds, Linux founder, and the Git Creator
What you may find in the developer’s Github profile
- Below the profile photo, you can find links to organizations within GitHub, where the developer consists — a great way to learn more about developer’s interests;
- Subscribers — one of the indicators of the developer’s level and his reputation in a professional environment;
- Repository and activity — the contribution made by the developer in Github projects. Even if you are not a technical expert, key words in the repository’s name will tell you what technologies the developer pays attention more. For example, viewing the profile of Linus Torvalds, it is not difficult to understand that this man is actively involved in the development of Linux :)
By the way, the Github profile will be interesting not only for customers who are going to hire an outsourcing team. Many companies, including ours, pay attention to the presence of high-quality open source projects in the candidate’s GitHub account. Participation in open source development confirms once again the developer’s interest in the IT-world, the level of projects is another indicator of the level of developer’s competence. How to make successful it project on Github you may find in our article. How to create a successful project on GitHub you may find here.
Fascinating GitHub which you might not know about
Github is not only about software products
The largest hosting service is used by the companies and the professionals from other fields: medicine, education, retail and many others.
In 2013, GitHub announced the possibility of storing geographic data, particularly GeoJSON files, in the form of interactive maps. The functionality of maps on GitHub includes visualization of changes in maps and the possibility of choosing the display style. One of the interesting projects in this direction — the repository that holds interactive story about all election districts of the United States.
State laws on GitHub
State laws of the United States, Germany, France, and Japan can also be found on Github. Steeve Morin, for example, made sure to put on the service all the changes in the French civil code from the time of Napoleon. Germany went further and created an account of the German Bundestag — in 2012, citizens received access to the latest laws on Github. Since then, residents of Germany can not only monitor changes but also to do pull requests, however, to make the change take effect, it must be approved by the Bundestag.
How you as an entrepreneur may use GitHub
As you can see, GitHub gives a wide range of opportunities not only for developers — recruiters, companies and even governments use it in their work. What an entrepreneur may get from GitHub:
- To find an offshore development team and to get additional info about developers, you will work with;
- The possibility to watch the latest trends in web and IT development, get news about projects and technologies, that are gaining popularity;
- Get data about your projects-competitors and project-icons developing;
- To increase your solution effectiveness, by creating the company’s profile and asking GitHub members to become your project’s contributors.
Studio stfalcon.com has strong experience in developing large-scale solutions for big companies and we’d love to work on a project for your business. Tell us more about what you need info@stfalcon.com. Let’s create something amazing together!
