Zach Holman's slides on patterns GitHub uses to scale their team Ruby Patterns from GitHub's Codebase:
Your company is going to have tons of success, which means you'll have to hire tons of people.
My favorites:
- Every project gets a
script/bootstrapfor fetching dependencies, putting data in place, and getting new people ready to go ASAP. This script comes in handy for CI too. - Try new techniques by deploying it only to team members at first. The example here was auto-escaping markup. They started with this only enabled for staff, instead of turning it on for everyone and feeling the hurt.
- Build projects within projects. Inevitably areas of functionality start to get so complex or generic that they want to be their own thing. Start by partitioning these things into
lib/some_project, document it with a read me inlib/some_projectand put the tests intest/some_project. If you need to share it across apps or scale it differently someday, you can pull those folders out and there you go. - Write internal, concise API docs with TomDoc. Most things only need 1-3 lines of prose to explain what’s going on. Don’t worry about generating browse-able docs, just look in the code. I heart TomDoc so much.
These ideas really aren’t about patterns, or scaling the volume of traffic your business can handle. They’re about scaling the size of your team and getting more effectiveness out of every person you add.
