GitHub works because it is based on the idea that sharing ideas and collaboration can make building code better. Open source is truly the way to do this and GitHub continues to expand and make its product better because of the sheer number of developers who have adopted GitHub over the years. They are the largest developer community, growing 10k – 15k users each day.
GitHub is unique because they spend real time working on the community for their users and promoting useful tools and ideas for coding with ease including:
Internal software development communities – These communities along with the blog offer information and useful help/collaboration for devs.
Code sharing and re-use – While not all code can be repeated, there are many places where reusing code is highly efficient and GitHub helps you do that for your own projects and to share with the greater community.
Encourages open communications between teams and users – It is extremely easy to keep your whole team up to date on what is happening on a project, especially because of Pull Requests, Code Review and Continuous Integration.
Making Pull Requests (PR) a key concept – Share changes you’ve pushed to a repository with others. When a pull request is made, you can discuss and review the changes with others and add further commits before the changes are merged into the repository.
- Code review – this is apart of the PR process. When a developer creates a PR they assign it one or more peers for review.
Continuous Integration – this is the process that runs an automatic series of tests against a codebase each time a change occurs.
GitHub is powerful when users in the community follow these suggestions. These ideas encourage strong communication which means that teams are able to work more efficiently because everyone is in the loop and know what changes are being made, when and by whom and nothing can go into production without review.