A big merge is the only press release your open source project needs now bit.ly/PxEYSo
— Ted Nyman (@tnm) August 20, 2012
I came across this tweet via the awesome Prismatic service, which brings me cool content I didn’t know I was looking for. The comment talks to something we have been talking about at RedMonk for a while. Code, rather than PR, is what talks when developers are the potential community in question. Github is your resume. Github is increasingly where you foster community in the age of distributed version control, where forks are OK, as long as they support the art and science of the merge. Developer engagement is increasingly peer to peer, with Github as the communications layer. If you want to work with developers you have to understand this dynamic.
Open source foundations, and vendors supporting open source projects, of course still have a significant role to play in software development at large, but developers don’t read press releases. Developers are their own best marketers, and they do it with code.
Even for Companies: Github is your Resume | Ryan Stewart – Mountaineer Coding says:
August 20, 2012 at 5:24 pm
[…] Governor that resonated because I think Adobe is doing it right. The premise of the post is that your code is all you need for PR. Sometimes that’s releasing code, but more importantly, when you control a project, […]