One of my goals at GitHub is to make GitHub more approachable to developers. If you use GitHub, I want you to have tools that complement the way you work and help you to be more effective. In some cases that’s integrating directly in your Editor or IDE of choice. In other cases, it’s offering tools that work side-by-side with your existing tools.

Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of .NET’s debut to the world. And Visual Studio was first released twenty years ago! In a recent episode of On .NET, I went to the Channel 9 studios to talk a bit about the history of .NET, my work at GitHub, and challenges to .NET’s future success among other random diversions.

Happy New Year! I hope you make the most of this year. To help you out, I have a tiny little Git alias that might save you a few seconds here and there.

On Tuesday, November 8, 2016 I’ll be giving a talk entitled “Social Coding for Effective Teams and Products” at QCon SF as part of the “Soft Skills” track. If you happen to be in San Francisco at that time, come check it out.

In the beginning of the year I announced a .NET Port of GitHub’s Scientist library. Since then I and several contributors from the community (kudos to them all!) have been hard at work getting this library to 1.0 status. Ok, maybe not that hard considering how long it’s taken. This has been a side project labor of love for me and the others.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I have a big problem as a dad.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”