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GitHub did not ship much 2015-2020. Why?

The Pragmatic Engineer • 1:41 minutes • Published 2025-06-22 • YouTube

🤖 AI-Generated Summary:

📹 Video Information:

Title: GitHub did not ship much 2015-2020. Why?
Duration: 01:41

Overview

The video discusses the challenges GitHub faced between 2015 and 2020, particularly around innovation, stability, and managing user expectations. It highlights how the platform’s rapid growth, beloved brand status, and internal culture influenced its product development and release strategies.

Main Topics Covered

  • GitHub’s growth and challenges from 2015 to 2020
  • User expectations and emotional attachment to GitHub
  • The impact of high expectations on product shipping and innovation
  • Internal culture and decision-making around feature releases
  • The transition period involving CEO changes and organizational culture shifts
  • Balancing innovation with stability, security, and accessibility

Key Takeaways & Insights

  • GitHub’s brand loyalty created very high expectations, making users sensitive to changes and outages.
  • Fear of negative reactions led to cautious shipping practices, with many features developed internally but not publicly released.
  • A “loud minority” of vocal users can create pressure that affects decision-making, even when the silent majority may be fine with changes.
  • Organizational changes and cultural challenges slowed down public innovation despite ongoing internal development.
  • Significant behind-the-scenes investment in stability, security, and accessibility was crucial to maintaining platform reliability.
  • Over time, GitHub managed to improve its pace of innovation while maintaining fundamental platform qualities.

Actionable Strategies

  • Balance innovation with stability by investing in infrastructure and security behind the scenes.
  • Listen carefully to user feedback but recognize that vocal minorities may not represent the majority’s opinion.
  • Foster an internal culture that encourages shipping features confidently without excessive fear of backlash.
  • Manage user expectations transparently to reduce disappointment when changes happen.
  • Prioritize accessibility and availability as core components of product development.
  • Use internal testing and staged rollouts to refine features before public release.

Specific Details & Examples

  • The video references the period before and after Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub as a time of organizational and cultural transition.
  • The “Octo” (GitHub’s mascot) is mentioned as a symbol of user affection and brand loyalty.
  • The concept of “staff shipping” or “stock fooding” is introduced, describing features released internally but not publicly.
  • CEO changes during the period contributed to cultural shifts impacting innovation and shipping practices.

Warnings & Common Mistakes

  • Avoid letting fear of negative user reactions paralyze shipping and innovation.
  • Be cautious of over-prioritizing the vocal minority’s complaints at the expense of broader user needs.
  • Don’t underestimate the importance of behind-the-scenes work in security, availability, and accessibility.
  • Avoid internal silos where features never reach public release due to excessive caution.

Resources & Next Steps

  • While no specific tools or resources are mentioned, the video implies that organizations should invest in infrastructure, user research, and cultural change initiatives to improve innovation and stability.
  • Viewers are encouraged to focus on balancing user feedback with internal confidence to ship features.
  • Further learning could include studying GitHub’s post-2020 development practices and Microsoft’s integration strategies.

📝 Transcript (57 entries):

What happened there from 2015 to 2020? It almost felt like I'm sure people were working but from the outside it just looked like nothing like barren land. Big problem that GitHub had especially before the Microsoft acquisition and for some time after that was that the platform had grown so much and so many people were relying on it being available and not broken. Plus many developers did back then and still are very much in love with the brand like the Octo. If you have something that is so beloved by the space that also means the expectations are really high. It's often that the disappointment is even bigger if you actually care about something. While if you don't give a damn about this thing, then whether it's up or down or whether it's broken doesn't really matter to you because you hate it anyway. And so I think those two things combined led to people really being worried about shipping stuff because you would change something and the reaction from developers when you change something, whether it's the user interface, how things work, eight limits and things like that is often there's a loud minority yelling on the internet and there's a silent majority that are actually fine with the change but don't say anything and a small change might lead to an outage. I think that created an organization that actually still shipped a lot of things in what we call staff shship what Microsoft called stock fooding. So features that landed within the GitHub organization that hubbers would see when they used that created a culture where things were internally shipped but never made it to the public because everybody was worried is that good enough to ship it. CEO change was in flight. There were a number of cultural issues. It took us a while to get the organization back into a state where we could both innovate really fast and keep the fundamentals in place. keep security, availability, accessibility, things that you might not actually see have changed because everything is working. You don't notice it. But created a lot of investment behind the scenes. So we are feeling good about the pace of innovation that we have today. [Music]