GitHub+Microsoft: Looking Forward by Looking Back

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  Ted CarstensenPlatform Director
  Heavybit

The Heavybit community is proud to count some of the top operators from GitHub and Microsoft as active members and advisors. Over the years we’ve partnered with these folks to share their learnings with our member companies at Speaker Series events, in our podcast studio, and on our blog.

Considering the incredible news this week of the largest devtool acquisition yet, I thought it would be helpful to collect some of the best Microsoft, GitHub, and Microsoft+GitHub content that we’ve got. Watch, listen, and read about the paths these two companies took that led to Microsoft’s decision to buy GitHub for 7.5 billion.

To Be Continuous Ep. #39, Transforming Microsoft Into An Open Source Company (Podcast)

In this episode of To Be Continuous, Edith and Paul are joined by Martin Woodward from Microsoft and Ed Blankenship from Algorithmia (ex-Microsoft). They discuss the cultural and technological shift that was necessary to transform Microsoft into an open source company. Martin talks about how as the owner of CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source community, he created Microsoft’s GitHub account. He also shares tricks he used to drive adoption inside Microsoft, such as allowing people to use their personal GitHub accounts, the subsequent challenges that this created and how he overcame them.

Land and Expand Strategies at GitHub and New Relic (Speaker Series)

Watch this presentation by Brian Doll, who served as the VP of Strategy for GitHub, where he developed the company’s corporate, business and product strategy. Would you like to be acquired by Microsoft for 7.5 billion? You might want to take notes on how Github managed to grow so fast from the early days.

JAMstack Radio Ep. #5, GraphQL At GitHub (Podcast)

GitHub isn’t just a community for developers, they also drive the growth (or death) of the latest tools, languages, and frameworks. In this episode of JAMstack Radio, Brian and Ryan talk to GitHub Platform Engineering Manager Kyle Daigle about what makes GraphQL such a great query tool, especially for open-source projects. Fresh from the GraphQL Summit, Daigle shares his observations about who’s using it and why he can’t wait for it to be “uncool.”

Developer Content Marketing and Growth Hacking (Speaker Series)

Hiten Shah dives deep into the value that GitHub brings to fledgling developer product communities. It’s no secret that GitHub makes collaborating on and shipping code easier, but it’s also one of the best tools available to young devtool companies who are hungry for passionate new users. Shah shares some valuable tactics for finding those users using some of GitHub’s platform tools.

Open Source as Business Strategy with Segment’s Peter Reinhardt (Speaker Series)

GitHub is a tool to host code, sure, but it’s sometimes also a tool to test product market fit. In this fireside chat, Segment’s Peter Reinhardt shares how the Segment team used GitHub to test the market for the earliest form of Segment. Turns out a concentrated community of active open source developers can be one way to short circuit the often harrowing path to product market fit.

Practical Product Ep. #13, Managing Stakeholder Relationships (Podcast)

Want to learn how GitHub approaches building its own products and features? Look no further than this episode of Practical Product, where Craig and Rimas are joined by Kathy Simpson from GitHub. Kathy discusses her approach to identifying and managing product stakeholders. She reveals how she handles disgruntled stakeholders, suggesting a proactive mindset that includes breaking bad news quickly, admitting to mistakes openly and figuring out what communication style best suits each stakeholder group.

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