Too many startups do this thing where they build their reputation with all these great technical blog posts and fascinating public talks, and then they become a Real Company and suddenly decide they’re too cool to be open and transparent. Maybe the lawyers get to them, or maybe all the cool ninja rockstars become managers.

In any case, I think that’s stupid. I don’t want GitHub to be one of those companies. I think the scaling problems we face — both technical and human — as we near five million users and 250 employees are super interesting to talk about and learn from.

A lot of my talks like How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub and posts like How GitHub Works are nifty, but they represent a snapshot of the company when we were 30-75 employees. We’re 217 today, and things inevitably changed to grow the company to that scale.

This talk is a retrospective: it takes a closer look at specific things that we’ve said over the last few years, and then details the adjustments that were made as we’ve grown.

Slides

Video

Check out QCon’s website, which has a tidy little video with integrated slide show baked in. We’re basically living in the future these days.