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**Jerod Santo:** Stand near a wall... |
**Coby Chapple:** Like, just walk around the perimeter of the room until something turns up? Or a door handle that unless you reach for it won't show up. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's tough though, because you're fighting against clutter. |
**Coby Chapple:** You're fighting against clutter, but that also begs the question, "Why is there clutter?" |
**Jerod Santo:** It's a complex tool. \[laughs\] |
**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, it's a tough set of problems. |
**Jerod Santo:** So even this... We're talking about the code review aspect - you can argue it's a refinement to a thing that existed... It's a big change to a thing that existed, but Projects is like a brand new tab. So tell us about Projects. |
**Coby Chapple:** Projects is something that we have wanted internally for a long time, because we like simple workflows and simple, basic building blocks of functionality that are flexible. We don't wanna dictate workflow to people, because what works in one company or in one open source organization or in one persona... |
So we're building a product that a huge variety of people and situations -- it needs to fit into a lot of different things, and so we don't wanna get heavy-handed about process. That's a philosophy we try and take in lots of different places in our product. For example in the code review, we don't dictate... |
**Jerod Santo:** How you do it... |
**Coby Chapple:** ...we wanna provide options like, "Okay, if you wanna protect this branch and don't allow other people to commit to it", we should have that as an option, but we don't tend to get opinionated about that. |
So with Projects, we wanted to start with something very simple. It's a fairly basic set of functionality, but the goal is to create something that, similar to our issue tracking -- like, our issue tracking is fairly simple, but that means it's flexible, and people can build on it; as a platform too, we want this to be... |
Projects is interesting, it's the first time we've expanded our product functionality in terms of like having a new tab... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right, or a new page... |
**Coby Chapple:** It's the first time we've done that in a while, and hopefully it's something that's gonna be a big part of our product going forward. |
**Jerod Santo:** I have lots of questions about Projects, and I realize that you may not have all the answers, but one aspect of it is, is it loosely tied to Issues but it's not a hundred percent tied to Issues? That seems, like it was a tough spot - again tradeoffs... But how do Issues relate to Projects and what were... |
**Coby Chapple:** Sure. The thing with Issues and Projects... Projects - there are lots of things that are involved in a project. Sometimes it's an issue, sometimes it's a pull request, sometimes it's a comment that's on a commit, or it's just a general observation that someone has, so we don't wanna force people to cr... |
We're looking at ways that we can bring in some functionality of like issues and pull requests, or improving what can be part of a project in terms of the functionality, but at the end of the day the problems you're solving with a project are not technical problems; they're people problems, they're project management c... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[16:02\] Yeah, that makes sense. Another question, and this one seems more fundamental to me - you guys decided to make a project at the repo layer of abstraction, right? Like, you attach a project on this repository, right? A lot of projects span repos... |
**Coby Chapple:** Yep. |
**Jerod Santo:** I mean, I could think of -- even inside the Changelog we have a couple different... We have our website codebase, then we have Nightly's codebase, and we may have a redesign of a certain aspect that's gonna touch multiple things, and that's a small change. I think Ethereum has like 16 Go projects, and ... |
**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, that's a great question. That's a question that we've asked ourselves a lot, and we have the same problem, too. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I'm sure you do. |
**Coby Chapple:** GitHub is a 600-person company; there are so many things that we want to happen that span multiple repos, there are so many things that maybe are not even related to code, but our organizational concern is that they don't have a repo... But that's one of the other things that we have always done at th... |
One of the problems that we haven't really found a satisfying way to solve is how to have things live at different levels and still make sense, because we don't wanna just create projects within projects within projects, and have this infinite nesting thing, because then we're potentially creating all kinds of other in... |
**Jerod Santo:** You also end up with a junk drawer often times, where everything goes in this one big thing. |
**Coby Chapple:** Right. Whereas with some of the changes we've made recently to the pricing mode as well -- because for a long time at GitHub we had unlimited repos ourselves... |
**Jerod Santo:** But I didn't! \[laughs\] |
**Coby Chapple:** Right, exactly. So that was one of the main motivators for some of the pricing changes - we want people to be able to create as many repos as they want, so that they can use repos in a flexible way that we've seen work internally. |
For the moment, with those changes that we've made, and then introducing things like Projects, now people can create as many repos as they want, and have projects attached to them. That's something that we've seen work really well in our company - liberally creating repositories and using them in whatever ways make sen... |
That's why Projects are at a repo level at the moment, but we're definitely looking into ways that we can have it span multiple repos, organization-level stuff... It's something we're thinking a lot about, but it's a non-trivial problem to solve... |
**Jerod Santo:** I definitely can see where that would be difficult to do. |
**Coby Chapple:** Another interesting facet to that is our product is also an enterprise product. We have an on-premise version, and in that situation you actually have a third level of hierarchy. It's not just teams and organizations. They have a dedicated instance... In many enterprise organizations, the Organization... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's interesting. I've never thought about that. |
**Coby Chapple:** \[20:01\] So there's other things that we need to consider in terms of how our product decisions are gonna affect our product in different ways. |
**Jerod Santo:** That leads me into this next thought... Looking at Projects - you guys just launched it; was it November 2016? No, it was November, because right now it's October. When was that? August, September? I don't know... Fall of 2016. It feels very, very 1.0. Here's where the question is - you can interpret a... |
**Coby Chapple:** We are actively working on this as something that's gonna be improved a lot in the future. |
**Jerod Santo:** Awesome. |
**Coby Chapple:** This is very much the simplest thing that could possibly work, but that's not how it's gonna stay. |
**Jerod Santo:** Cool. |
**Coby Chapple:** That's something I'm very confident in saying. We built early versions of it ourselves and started using it internally, and we want this to be something that we can depend on internally ourselves, and that means it's gonna get improved. |
I think also the biggest thing, like I said before - we want other people to build on this too, so that's why we're spending a lot of time getting the basics right, before we start adding complexity to this part of the project. Because if we don't get the basics right, it'll make it hard for our integrators, for all ki... |
**Jerod Santo:** That reminds me of an old term about Apple called "sherlocking" - do you know that term? |
**Coby Chapple:** I do. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, the idea being that the platform provider or the big dog in the room sees a feature that looks nice and says - this is the cynical viewpoint, right? |
**Coby Chapple:** Right. |
**Jerod Santo:** Sees a feature and says that a third-party created on top of the platform to provide value... So a lot of times these people see gaps, and they say "Oh, I'm gonna fill that need. This helps me", and they turn it into a product or a business, and famously -- I think Watson was the name of the product th... |
**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, a classic example... |
**Jerod Santo:** ...and they got sherlocked, because now Apple just built that into the OS, and now that guy's out of business. So like you said, you have a lot of platform builders, and there's an ecosystem around it, so thoughts on this sherlocking potentially some of your loyal developers... |
**Coby Chapple:** Yeah, and there's a lot of integrators that have built project management functionality on top of our Issues API. Our approach to this is we wanna save them some of the work, but still create opportunities for them to create value for people. Because, like I said before, we don't wanna dictate workflo... |
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