All of this would have been easy to find out simply by asking
I'm not a journalist, but in an ideal scenario, how would somebody have known that you were one of the key members of the project?
It's not like Google (or anybody else) makes this easy to know. And call me jaded, but something tells me official Google PR channels would not have been really helpful for this.
And also - are most engineers in your sort of position even free to remark on such projects w.r.t. NDAs, etc?
"I'm not a journalist, but in an ideal scenario, how would somebody have known that you were one of the key members of the project?"
It's not about asking me, it's about not asserting things you don't know.
Instead of saying "people did x for y reason" when you have literally no data on x or y, you could say "I don't know why x happened, i only know about z".
Or if it's super important you try to put something there, beforehand, you could say "hey does anyone know why x happened? I'm working on a blog post and want to get it right".
Then, someone like me who saw it could happily email you or whatever and say "hey, here's the real story on x".
Or not, in which case you can leave it at "i don't know".
The right answer is not to just assert random things you make up in your head and force people to correct you. I'm aware of the old adage of basically "just put wrong stuff out there and someone will correct you", but i generally think that's super poor form when it's about *other people or things and their motivations". I care less when it's about "why is the sky blue".
In this case, it also happens that there are plenty of on-record interviews and other things where what i said, was said back in the day.
So a little spleunking would have told them the answer anyway.
This explains so much about modern media, news, and story-telling. It's easier to make up a plausible narrative that supports your story than simply admitting you don't know.
You can see how as the article develops, they go from being "uncertain what made GitHub succeed" to definitively being sure about why it succeeded. It doesn't surprise me that details were glossed over as the story rose to the ultimate crescendo of "GitHub dominates".
This is how a good tale is spun and the people lap it up. What's a good tale without a bit of embellishment? (said every bard since antiquity)
To be a bit more generous: I think from Scott Chacon's point of view, "They had no taste and we beat them in the market" is a fair way to hold the elephant. Lacking the Google-internal perspective, it's a reasonable conclusion from the signal he has. I don't get the sense from this post that he's trying to publish a doctoral thesis on the historical situation in the industry; he's providing some primary-source testimony from his point of view.
He's not just providing primary source testimony from his point of view, he's trying to pretend he has primary source testmony on what others were doing as well.
If he left out the parts where he has no data (or said i don't know), it would have IMHO been a better post, and actually primary source testimony.
You also don't run into the Gell-Mann amnesia problem this way.
I'd imagine that if you can say "I don't know why x happened" then you can also save some breath and say nothing at all, and there are billions of folks doing that right now.
Putting out a general inquiry of "why did x happen?" also has a lot of stigma attached to it in RTFM, LMGTFY internet culture. The result will not be a cloud of other people interested in the answer upvoting the question to make it visible to folk who might actually know. Snide comebacks notwithstanding the question will languish forgotten in a dusty corner of whichever forum it was asked within.
But bold assertions based on plausible conjecture? That can earn upvotes, drive engagement, draw ad clicks, and sometimes even prompt corrections from actual experts.
Certainly not an ideal situation but this does appear to be where we're at.
Scott Chacon had absolutely zero obligation to reach out to you.
No more than a movie critic has an obligation to speak with the director before printing their review. He is comparing/contrasting GitHub with Google Code, the product you released. That is all.
As for his claims, I don't even see how the linked article significantly contradicts what you yourself have said about the genesis and goals of Google Code.
You claim that the purpose of Google Code was mainly just to break the SourceForge monoculture. In other words, it wasn't a product intended to be a polished worldbeater. Not something great. Not the next Gmail. Just something functional. A monoculture-preventer.
Okay.
(I am a software engineer as well, so I understand that even this level of creation involves many thousands of engineer-hours of blood, sweat, and tears. Not a knock.)
So yeah, it doesn't sound like you created Google Code with "taste" which the linked article seems to be using as shorthand for "lots of product passion and UX polish."
While the tone of the linked article seems a little more aggressive than it needs to be it... seems correct, based on what you've said?
He had an obligation not to assert as fact things he didn't know to be facts. I'm not going to high-horse it; it's a character fault I share, and I think we all do at times. But at the same time, you can't flip it around on the person who knew he was wrong, and publicly cleared the air. Chacon was wrong about something. That's his problem, his fault, nobody else's.
From the article I'm going to quote Google Code mentions.
There are other assertions about Google's internal adoption of Git, but these seem to be backed up by e.g. the email he screenshotted.
Furthermore, the players (Sourceforge, Google
Code, etc) who eventually did care, after seeing
Git and GitHub rising in popularity, simply had
no taste.
This is a subjective and opinionated statement, for sure. It doesn't seem like an assertion of fact to me.
In 2011, both Google Code and BitBucket added Git
support, which I’ll mark as the year that the nail
was in the Mercurial coffin.
First part fact, second part clearly opinion.
Just 4 years later, in 2015, Google Code just
completely gave up and shut it’s service down. In the
email they sent out, they basically said “just move to
GitHub”.
What is non-factual here? He screencaps the email.
So, Why Not Google Code?
This section is really about what Github achieved, no direct Google Code assertions.
The original article is correct, the other
hosts focused on distribution and revenue streams.
We cared about developers.
Well, this is a speculation that (according to one Google Code member) is not correct - "DannyBee" claims they just wanted to avoid a SourceForge monoculture.
Is this really the point of contention?
I read the article in the context of "a guy who worked at Github talking about his experience at Github, which unavoidably will also mention externalities like the competition" and not at all in the context of "hey! this is the inside scoop on google! I got facts about Google's inner workings!"
I just don't think there's a reasonable assumption that this should have been like, a rigorously fact-checked statement.
Expecting a personal blog to adhere to the standards of some other kind of publishing is misguided and unrealistic. This is clearly a personal account and I'm just baffled that anybody would confuse a personal account like this with capital-j Journalism.
This probably reads as pedantry (if anybody actually reads this post) but it's really, an honest attempt to understand.
Yeah but you said "nobody bothers to actually ask other people things anymore" and I don't think it's reasonable to expect someone to ask about this when the probability of getting an answer is so low.
The way it used to work is that tech journalists (or sports journalists, or any other type) had contacts in the industry. If those people were not directly involved, they probably could at least suggest someone else who might know. Leads were followed up, and eventually the writer got the story.
I'm not sure how it works now, cynically I would suggest that the writer asks an LLM to write the story, gets a rehash of Wikipedia and other sources, and they maybe makes some attempts at firsthand verification.
That is neat, but Scott Chacon is not a journalist, does not act like a journalist and what you are reading is not tech journalism.
You are reading the personal diary of someone with personal connection to a topic and complaining that it is not up to the standards of professional journalism.
The linked article doesn't claim to have insight into the inner workings of the Google Code team, or what Google's leadership hoped to accomplish with that product.
Rather, he is comparing the actual released products.
Specifically, he says that competitors to Github had no "taste", which he seems to be using as shorthand for "making a polished product and really focusing on developer/user experience."
You don't need to interview the folks who worked on Google Code to make that claim, any more than I need to interview Steven Spielberg before I comment on one of his movies.
(Based on my memories of Google Code, I'd say the linked article's observations about Google Code are also absolutely correct, although that's really beside the point)
Well, finding, vetting, and getting comments from sources is like half of journalism. If you can't or won't do that, whatever you are doing is probably not journalism. It's just an editorial, think-piece, or whatever.
Maybe a cofounder of GitHub has the reach and network to ask for the e-mail of someone who worked on the Google Code team. A journalist might not, that's true.
Just flat out saying they had no taste in product development, however, is a bit of trash talking for no reason.
It's not like Google (or anybody else) makes this easy to know. And call me jaded, but something tells me official Google PR channels would not have been really helpful for this.
And also - are most engineers in your sort of position even free to remark on such projects w.r.t. NDAs, etc?