---
layout: post
title: "Your team should work like an open source project"
date: 2013-10-23
time: 23:16:16 -0400
external-url: http://tomayko.com/writings/adopt-an-open-source-process-constraints
---

Ryan Tomayko is a genius. He was employee #8 at GitHub and has been crucial (as
one of the early employees) in molding the work environment at GitHub. In this
post, he describes the way GitHub works &mdash; and the way he thinks your team
should work. Ideally, your team will work as an open-source project: async, no
managers, etc. I won't spoil it for you &mdash; go take a look.

---
layout: post
title: "Your team should work like an open source project"
date: 2013-10-23
time: 23:16:16 -0400
external-url: http://tomayko.com/writings/adopt-an-open-source-process-constraints
---

Ryan Tomayko is a genius. He was employee #8 at GitHub and has been crucial (as
one of the early employees) in molding the work environment at GitHub. In this
post, he describes the way GitHub works &mdash; and the way he thinks your team
should work. Ideally, your team will work as an open-source project: async, no
managers, etc. I won't spoil it for you &mdash; go take a look.

Favourite quotes:

> I like to call it "learning by lurking." ... So people [e.g. new hires]
> are able to learn all kinds of new things just by essentially sitting in
> a chat room...

And

> Anything that you do has to be available to everyone in a way that is
> asynchronous. ... This is really powerful. It means we can have people in
> Australia that are just as in tune with what's going on in the company as
> people [in the main office]. So we try to build [asynchronous tooling]
> into every part of the GitHub process. ... Everything should have a URL.

And

> Be lock free. Don't require people to synchronize on a single resource in
> order for people to get work done. Try to automate things to make sure
> that people can act independently or with as little friction as possible.

Speaking on company hiring:

> A lot of companies are using open source to find people that they like
> [and want to hire], but they're really not offering them this kind of
> work environment where they excel. [i.e. in open source workflow]

Add quotes to rtomayko post.
Add quotes to rtomayko post.
