But that wasn’t why the company got its start as a distributed team. At first, they simply lacked an office. “We started GitHub as a side project, so there was no office for the first two years,” says Wanstrath. Instead, they used GitHub itself, along with Campfire, to build the company, hiring their first employee in distant Colorado. But what started as a matter of practicality is now baked into the soul of the company. “We’ve tried to keep that spirit alive over the past four years,” says Wanstrath, who along with his colleagues has built the company into a profitable and much chattered about firm employing around 60 people, 60 percent of whom work out of the company’s San Francisco office with the rest spread around the world.

Talent

Wanstrath’s approach to hiring is straightforward. Hire the best and, so far, questions of cultural fit and remote team-ready communication skills have followed naturally from that. “We’re focused on finding the very cream of the crop. They’ve all had those skills. It just comes with being a good developer or a good designer,” he says, though Jon Maddox, a GitHub developer based in Richmond, Virginia, detects a common theme in the personality types that get hired. Ego, apparently, is out.

“Everybody listens to everybody, so anyone who would come in thinking that they know everything, somebody that isn’t impressed by anything, that would be a turnoff,” Maddox explains. Sonya Green, a member of the GitHub support team agrees that enthusiasm is key: “We tend to hire A-level people, people who strive and want to work on the things they’re working on. That trumps a lot of personality flaws or wanting to sleep till noon – that is no problem with us.”

Location, like soft skills, takes a back seat to raw talent and excitement for the work. “We’re optimizing for making GitHub really great, so if there’s someone who lives in Atlanta and they can’t move, but they’re the best person we can find, then we’re absolutely going to hire them and let them stay in Atlanta,” Wanstrath says. Once a person is hired, GitHub is as relaxed about when they work as where they work. Hours are “not really tied to coming to the office and let me see your face. It’s all based on doing quality work,” says Wanstrath.

That translates to support workers organizing their schedules to cover 24 hours and creative folks getting an extremely free hand. “For designers and developers building a new creative product, we don’t believe that an assembly-type nine to five really makes any sense,” says Wanstrath. “We built a lot of GitHub at 1 a.m., so why should anyone here be different? It’s all about having high morale. We think that makes better products. If people are enjoying their work, they’re going to be more creative. They’re going to be thinking about it in the shower and it’s going to be a better end result for the people using it.”

Tools

Wanstrath and his co-founders relied on Campfire when starting the company and the chat application is still central to how the team works together today. “Chat is sort of our real office,” says Wanstrath, who explains that GitHub has dozens of separate chat rooms set up, ranging for spaces to tell jokes and kick back to product-focused rooms in which to talk shop.

This constant chatter is good for keeping remote workers woven firmly into the fabric of the team, but it’s also important for those based in San Francisco, according to Wanstrath: “One of the things that can ruin companies as they grow is lack of communication. We want to be able to work distributed even if everyone’s here because we think that is just a better way of communicating.”

“If you have a sick day, you’re not going to miss everything if our communication is set up to be distributed,” he says, adding the understatement of the century: “Employees have the freedom to go to Brazil for a week and work and not miss anything, which I think is really great as far as the company culture goes.”

GitHub is essentially a software company, of course, so it’s no shock that they’ve also built themselves plenty of cool tools to help the distributed team members feel fully integrated in the company, including a handful of iPhone apps, an internal Twitter-like tool employees use to share what they’re working on, and another cool gadget explained by Maddox:

“One of our guys built, basically, an application to stream radio. It allowed everybody to pick music via our chat app to play in the office. That was really great and everybody remote got to watch the music, but then one day we added streaming. Once we added streaming, every single person, no matter where they work, can listen to the music that is playing in the office. That immediately brought everybody together and made them feel like they were doing the same thing. It sounds like it’s not a really big deal but it’s amazing to see how big of a deal it actually was.”

Tips

The 'hubbernauts' bi-annual company summit.

Aside from cementing the team through communication tools, Wanstrath also believes it’s essential to bring the whole group face to face at regular intervals. New hires are flown out to San Francisco to get to know the team, and all employees meet up for twice yearly summits. “I think you have a better context of where someone’s coming from that you interact with through text or chat once you meet them in person,” says Wanstrath explaining the purpose of the all-hands get togethers. “Someone that you might find abrasive because of the way they text, when you meet them, you might be like, ‘Oh, he’s just very serious all the time. He’s not angry.’”

“You’ll also be a lot more empowered to jump in and disagree with someone if you’re confident that you’re on the same team with them and they’re not going to look at it as a power play,” he adds, noting that using video to connect everyone each Friday for a “Beer:30″ hang out to watch the founders give short presentations also helps.

Wanstrath is clearly proud of the culture his company has built (and his employees seem to adore it as well, consistently using “we” to describe the company’s plans and policies – Green is even relocating her family from Boston to San Francisco to spend more time in person with her colleagues) but just because it works for them, doesn’t mean he thinks others should blindly copy their example. “Don’t do X because Apple did it or because Zynga did it. Try to figure out why Apple did it and decide if it makes sense for us, our company. I don’t think anyone should just copy GitHub,” says Wanstrath.

Nor does GitHub slavishly copy industry leaders. As of yet, the company has no managers, for example. “We just haven’t seen a need for them,” Wanstrath explains. “We didn’t add managers when we had 20 people because that’s what you do. We’ve been waiting until we needed people to work full-time on managing work, and I think that’s a byproduct of trying to develop our own unique product development process that makes GitHub as good as possible.”

The best advice, Wanstrath feels, isn’t a specific tool or practice, but to keep learning and keep focused. “None of this was just set up on the first day. It’s all really evolved along the way,” he says, and the evolution continues: “I hope that GitHub in three years looks completely different and more awesome because we’ve just gotten way better at communicating and handling a distributed team.” But what doesn’t change is the goal – a great product.

“We’ve never raised any outside capital, so everything is bootstrapped. We started charging three months after our beta, so the whole time that GitHub has been alive, it’s been funded by its customers,” he says. “We really believe that the most important thing is making GitHub high quality. It has to be something that people are willing to pay for, because if they pay for it, we can keep working on awesome stuff.”

Image courtesy Flickr user VanDammeMaarten.be

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It’s simple and easy-to-use. Users can create “channels” (chat rooms) for projects or teams and invite others to join them. Conversations are shown in the large pane in the center of the window. Files can be shared through the app simply by dragging them and dropping them onto the chat window; any images that are uploaded are displayed with a live preview.

One small irritation that I noticed when testing out the demo is that the chat window doesn’t actually update in real-time; I’d occasionally have to refresh my browser window to see the latest update from the other users. Additionally, users do need to upload an avatar, otherwise it’s difficult to determine who said what, and also the “chunky” design means that busy conversations would require a lot of scrolling to follow. However, it works pretty well and as it’s an open-source project, it can be built upon or modified as required. If you’re looking for a basic self-hosted group chat app it’s certainly worth checking out.

Holla is a Rails application; it can be downloaded from Github. If you’d just like to try it out, there’s a free live demo here.

What group chat apps do you use?

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(via Download Squad)

Propane

It’s a fine way to power a BBQ, but it’s also more than that. Propane is a new piece of beta software that does what I previously did using a Fluid browser instance. Specifically, it runs Campfire-based chatrooms, which are a popular tool for people who need to collaborate in real-time with a distributed team. I use Campfire rooms to coordinate with other writers at various blog sites where time and scheduling is a primary concern, but that’s just one possible use.

Like with a Fluid instance, Propane provides Campfire with the bare minimum of browser chrome, so that it does in fact look like a native OS X app. It also provides some nice bells and whistles that allow you to customize the how and why of notification sounds and messages, including Growl notifications. There’s also great tools for better file sharing, including automatic source detection when you drag content (text and images) from a Safari window into your active chatroom in Propane.

Mailplane

I’m not actively trying to rhyme these app names, it’s just working out that way. Gmail is great, and Mail.app is nice enough, but I’d rather not use the two together if possible. I love Gmail’s web interface, but I’m not crazy about trying to manage my email activities in a browser window. Maybe that makes me old school, but I grew up on Outlook, and old habits die hard.

Mailplane delivers all the Gmail interface goodness with a nice, native app wrapper. Basically it, like Propane, is just a browser instance with some additional features specific to the web app in question that makes it easier to use. It’s those features that make the app worthwhile, though. Mailplane takes advantage of Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts to allow you to view and create new messages, reply, attach media, and more using convenient buttons located along the top of the app window. It also badges the app icon in your dock with the number of unread emails, and can notify you of new mail using sound and Growl.

Those with Google Apps and multiple accounts are also in luck, because it supports easy account switching and storage. There’s also an option to display an icon in the menu bar, including new mail count. You can try it out for free for a month, but it is a paid program, and will set you back $24.95 if you do decide to purchase.

Gdocsuploader

This is less an app and more of a handy little applet, but the single, focused service it provides is incredibly useful: a simple drag-and-drop interface for uploading documents to Google Docs. It may not seem like much, but it saves a lot of steps vs. the traditional method, which can quickly add up if you do most of your document editing in Google Docs, like I do.

All you have to do to use it is keep the app icon in your dock, and then drag any document onto the icon to upload it. It’ll prompt you once for your Google name and password, and afterward it’ll just work. If you prefer, opening the app will automatically take you to a file browser for selecting a file to upload manually.

None of the above apps does anything that you can’t do using the web, but they do offer time-saving and usability enhancements that you won’t necessarily get using only the corresponding app for each in a normal browser window. Just because web apps are often convenient and user-friendly doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be more so with a more solid connection to your desktop.

Have any tips on how to make web apps more native? Share them in the comments.

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1. Get a Unified Client. Assuming that you have contacts spread across multiple services (as most of us do), the first thing to do is to get a unified client to cut down on the number of applications that you have to run at one time. This also gets rid of time spent flipping through interfaces, trying to remember whether Jane was on MSN or GTalk. I’m using Adium (OS X only) at the moment; in the past, I’ve had success with Trillian or Miranda on Windows as well. These solutions aren’t ideal – I’d love to find something that aggregates all the chats I’m in – but they help.

2. Shove it Off to the Side: Unless chatting is your business, you need to put the chat windows somewhere that they won’t obscure whatever code or other project you’re actually working on. I run all of my communication applications on my laptop, which sits off to the side of my desktop monitors. That puts them close at hand, but ensures that they don’t overlap whatever I’m trying to see. I’m seriously considering adding a second monitor to the laptop to get more pixels for chat windows. If you don’t have a second computer, consider putting the chat windows on their own monitor, or at least a second workspace.

3. Set up Attention Flags: Particularly if you’re monitoring chat rooms, you probably don’t need to watch every message flow by. I’ve found it helpful to use software (like Conversation for IRC, or the Growl notification Greasemonkey script for Campfire, that can make a noise when my name (or a keyword) is mentioned.

4. Keep Logs: Disk space is cheap. Time spent trying to remember what was said, or embarrassment in having to ask contacts to repeat themselves, is expensive. Accordingly, I make sure to use clients that can log everything – and keep the logs. Surprisingly often I find myself searching these for a tip, URL, or action item.

I don’t claim to have the perfect strategy, but doing these things helps me keep up an active bunch of online communications while still managing to write code. What tips do you have to add for online conversation management?

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