On the topic of tech companies with money to spend, Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub was interesting! Paul Ford had some things to say about this.
GitHub rode the wave of git adoption to become the central repository for decentralized code archives. As a result, 27 million users maintain 80 million projects on it—some private and closed off, some open sourced, many abandoned after a weekend of inspiration. That’s a significant portion of the software in the world.
The article is a bit of an explanation for business folks who may not understand Git and GitHub itself. But, as with most of his writing, Paul adds a lot of humour and wit.
Towards the end, he touches on an interesting idea:
I had idle fantasies about what the world of technology would look like if, instead of files, we were all sharing repositories and managing our lives in git: book projects, code projects, side projects, article drafts, everything. It’s just so damned … safe. I come home, work on something, push the changes back to the master repository, and download it when I get to work. If I needed to collaborate with other people, nothing would need to change. I’d just give them access to my repositories (repos, for short). I imagined myself handing git repos to my kids. “These are yours now. Iteratively add features to them, as I taught you.”
I love this idea. To a degree, it gets to the heart of what we’re trying to do with Conveyor. We’re still focused on developers (agencies, specifically), but making version control more of something that just works in the background so you can focus on the important things is our goal.
And wouldn’t that be nice for all the work we do?
