In his Automating Inefficiencies screencast, Zach Holman (left) showed some of the goofy ways GitHub uses animated gifs, inside jokes, and hacks to make their Campfire chat room more fun.
Now he's got a followup piece, Why GitHub Hacks on Side Projects, which talks about the importance of building out "a side project culture." For GitHub, a Campfire bot that does all sorts of kooky things is the answer.
Hubot, our valiant Campfire bot, has continued to grow in complexity. A tiny list of his (current) capabilities:
- unlock the door to our office
- print out a list of the people currently in the office based on their wifi presence
- find an apartment in the area to rent
- deploy GitHub
- say an arbitrary string over the office speakers
- play an audio sample of deadmau5 to everyone through hacked Propane HTML5
- give you a quote from any movie or TV show
- tell you the build status of any git branch
- track and map packages
- SMS any GitHubber from Campfire
- embed a seven day weather forecast
We’re building more and more into Hubot every day. (Before you ask, no, he’s not open source yet, and yes, a few people are working on that.)
Read the full piece to learn why Zach thinks having pleasant distractions and an open, shared space to explore together is important.
