Working at GitHub

I’m coming on five years at GitHub (in December) and I thought I’d write a bit about what I’ve been up to lately and the fact that several of my teams are hiring. Five years passes by so quickly, right? I still get emails for feature requests on ASP.NET MVC. I always reply that the team would be happy to implement all of the suggestions and to just check the repository in a week’s time. I’m sure the team loves me for that.

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Cruising

Last week my family and I went on a cruise to Alaska with four other families and we didn’t die. Not that we should expect to die on a cruise, but being confined with a bunch of kids on a giant hunk of steel has a way of making one consider one’s mortality.

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Building an Atom Package in ES6

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The tagline for the Atom text editor is “A hackable text editor for the 21st Century”. As a Haack, this is a goal I can get behind.

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A Billion Is Cool

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Yesterday, the NuGet team announced that NuGet.org reached one billion package downloads!

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Thank You For Your Pull Request

As an open source maintainer, it’s important to recognize and show appreciation for contributions, especially external contributions.

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A Subtle Case Sensitivity Gotcha with Regular Expressions

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Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. - Jamie Zawinski

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Pitfalls of Unlimited Vacations

Vacation, All I ever wanted
Vacation, Had to get away
Vacation, Meant to be spent alone
Lyrics by The Go Go’s

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Semver Deep Links

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A long time request of http://semver.org/ (just shy of five years!) is to be able to link to specific headings and clauses of the Semver specification. For example, want to win that argument about PATCH version increments? Link to that section directly.

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A .NET port of Scientist

Over on the GitHub Engineering blog my co-worker Jesse Toth published a fascinating post about the Ruby library named Scientist we use at GitHub to help us run experiments comparing new code against the existing production code.

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Try it and I'll kill you

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I have a big problem as a dad.

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A haackedy 2015

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I planned to skip the tried and true year in review post because who reads such drivel anyways, amirite? They feel like one big exercise in vanity.

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To String or to string

Like many developers, I have many strong opinions about things that really do not matter. Even worse, I have the vanity to believe other developers want to read about it.

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Set up a smoking Git shell on Windows

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GitHub Desktop, the application formerly known as GitHub for Windows, is a streamlined GUI that makes it easy to contribute to repositories on GitHub.

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The Meaning of Work

The TED Radio Hour podcast has an amazing episode entitled “The Meaning of Work”. It consists of four segments that cover various aspects of finding meaning and motivation at work. You should definitely listen to it, but I’ll provide a brief summary here of some points I found interesting.

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Moneyball of Hiring

The shaman squatted next to the entrails on the ground and stared intently at the pattern formed by the splatter. There was something there, but confirmation was needed. Turning away from the decomposing remains, the shaman consulted the dregs of a cup of tea, searching the shifting patterns of the swirling tea leaves for corroboration. There it was. A decision could be made. “Yes, this person will be successful here. We should hire this person.”

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A better 404 page and redirects with GitHub Pages

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A while back I migrated my blog to Jekyll and GitHub Pages. I worked hard to preserve my existing URLs.

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The Open Sourcing of the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio

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Writing extensions to Visual Studio is really hard. As in turn your hair gray hard. In fact, I now have gray hairs and I didn’t when I started the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio project (true story).

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Tupac and HoloLens are not Holograms

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This past week I learned a new party trick. I can turn a holographic researcher beet red by simply referencing Tupac’s Hologram. It’s not because they identify strongly with East Coast hip-hop. Rather, it has to do with calling it a hologram in the first place.

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Git Alias To Migrate Commits To A Branch

Show of hands if this ever happens to you. After a long day of fighting fires at work, you settle into your favorite chair to unwind and write code. Your fingers fly over the keyboard punctuating your code with semi-colons or parentheses or whatever is appropriate.

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The Getting Better Moment

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The beads of sweat gathered on my forehead were oddly juxtaposed against the cool temperature of the air conditioned room. But there they were, caused by the heat of the CTO’s anger. I made a sloppy mistake and now sat in his office wondering if I was about to lose my job. My first full-time job. I recently found some archival footage of this moment.

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