Why TypeScript moved to GitHub in 2014

By GitHub

Categories: Product, Tools

Summary

After moving TypeScript's codebase to GitHub in 2014, the project saw a dramatic increase in engagement and adoption, going from 'crickets' to a thriving open-source community with over 9.5K views.

Key Takeaways

1. Increase transparency and engagement by fully embracing an open development process on GitHub, with all features going through pull requests.
2. Establish trust with the open-source community by being transparent about your processes and treating external contributors the same as internal ones.
3. Go where the action is - in this case, GitHub, which had become the hub for open-source collaboration and project hosting.
4. Leverage the built-in features and community engagement of popular platforms like GitHub to drive growth and adoption for your open-source project.
5. Avoid a 'throw it over the fence' approach to open-source, and instead fully commit to an open development process that encourages community participation.
6. Transparency and active community engagement are key to the success of an open-source project, as demonstrated by TypeScript's growth after embracing GitHub's platform.

Topics

• Open-Source Development
• GitHub Adoption
• Community Engagement
• Transparency in Software Projects
• Building Trust in Open-Source

Transcript Excerpt

In the Cople days, it was kind of open source in the sense that we would lop the source code out there in this repository and then people could file issues. But really what we would do, we sort of lop it over the fence and then we scrape the issues back into the internal bug tracker and then we run the internal processes on it. So it wasn't really >> maybe that's why it was crickets. [laughter] >> Well, there many other reasons, no doubt, right? But I mean that our trustworthiness as and ours be...