I’ve been pounding the “culture as programming” drum a while now.  The skill set and world-view of every engineer is shaped not only by their education and the work experience, but by the history of their mentors and role models.   Thus, not only have telecom’s applications been siloed, but the technologies, architectures and approaches have been as well.  It is obvious to me that as important as Web technologies are and will be, the culture divide between the more experienced and newly minted participants might be even more important.

I really feel this when I visit GitHub.  GitHub is an online service that provides source code control for developers.  For the non-technical reader, a source control service keeps snapshots of all of your source code, so that you can easily track what changes, go “back in time” if you need to, and manage contributions from many developers such that they don’t step on each others toes. Source code control is absolutely nothing new, and has been a staple of software development for nearly thirty years.  Any large development organization implements source code control, and depends on it.   However, GitHub is the next generation’s take on this old tool, and I think provides us with an interesting lense to understand the future:

• GitHub is a “social code hosting”, allowing you to easily subscribe to other people’s code bases. You get a complete RSS feed of what they are doing. You can branch your own code off of theirs so  you can change it if you want, and there’s a mechanism by which you can give it back with your changes.  In the past, source code control was tightly controlled by the software engineering organization.  Instead of the modern ethos of peer-to-peer, the past was very top down.
• GitHub makes the individual programmer the focal point, not the organization itself. This means that github makes complete sense if you are a single developer. In the past, source code version control was optional for individuals, and even for small groups, but never optional for larger groups.
• GitHub is about public communication: a very common way to communicate the existence of, and get the support for, your software project is to put it on GitHub.  There just was no analog to this in the past.
• GitHub is frequented and developed by the young.  The parent company “Logical Awesome”, has a simple website, without all of the management bios and traditional menu driven design of older companies.  They have a picture, and a contact link. That’s it. I happen to love their picture, which says it all for me.  I suppose I’m way too old and experienced to declare that my codes are perfect, but I appreciate the testosterone. I really do.