tl;dr

Go to https://gittogether.com and login with GitHub.

See people you follow on GitHub plus members of your teams and organizations as contacts.

If the people you want to talk to aren’t online or aren’t in your contact list, send them your GitTogether url (https://gittogether.com/your-github-id).

Chat away!

Background

It’s hard to know if your platform is any good until you’ve used it to build a real app, preferably one that you use yourself on a daily basis. So, when we first started developing the vLine platform and API two years ago, we also started building an app on top of it.

Since our lives basically revolve around GitHub, we decided to build a communications tool that does, too. We named it GitTogether, gave it a GitHub login, and populated the contacts list from the people you follow or work with on GitHub.

Fast-forward to today, and we have a robust app that we’ve been using internally as our primary communications tool for over a year. Since our main goal was to learn from the experience of building and using it, we never shared it very widely, but enough people have discovered it and found it useful that we figured we should finally spend some more time talking about it.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to do a series of blog posts on how it works under the hood, what we learned from the process of building it, and how you can build apps that share the same capabilities. But in the meantime, enjoy!