I listen to a variety of podcasts and currently I’m on a start up kick. Andrew Warner produces a constant stream of interesting interviews at mixergy.com.
One such interview was with Tom Preston-Werner, one of the founders of GitHub. The interview is almost a year old so you have to be a member to watch or listen, however a full transcript of the interview is still available.
Preston-Werner also appears to be responsible for inspiring Daniel Bachhuber’s recent post on open sourcing everything in a post titled Open Sourcing (Almost) Everything.
Here’s what struck me:
- User experience decisions about how GitHub looks and functions–projects are organized by user (people), not be project name
- Approach to their revenue model using open source software
- Preston-Werner founded Gravatar and sold it to WordPress
- If you’re looking to start a successful project, focus on solving a problem that frustrates you– that is a really great question to ponder.
- To keep a project interesting and fun, start thinking early on what your revenue model will be–not so you can become a billionaire or immediately charge people, but so that the cost or success of continuing the project doesn’t put you in debt or become a financial or emotional burden.
- Good passionate and constructive discussion is more valuable than voting to make a decision
- The people that don’t like something are usually more vocal than the people who do. You can’t automatically consider them the loudest people to be right or the majority.
- GitHub has native a native Mac client that sounds like it does lots of cool things
- GitHub can version images and show diffs between versioned images
- GitHub has a whole vision for making versioning available to people that don’t understand versioning and its value to businesses, etc.
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