Beyond the Commit: Building GitHub on GitHub

From innersource, to computer club, to eating our own dogfood, this is how we build GitHub on GitHub.

Most famously known as "eating your own dogfood," the process of building our products using our products is key to culture at GitHub. It allows us to learn and experience what you will feel, because if it doesn't work for us, or doesn't behave the way we'd expect, then it's not ready to be shipped. Through internal hackathons, computer clubs, and internal feature requests, we focus on creating products built by and for developers.

In this episode of Beyond the Commit, Neha Batra, VP of Engineering at GitHub, joins host Christopher Harrison to talk more about this developer-first approach and embracing the idea that if features don’t feel right for us, they won’t feel right for you or your developers either.

Many features have been born out of developers discovering pain points. Take merge queue for example. We wanted to be able to ship faster and reduce the potential for one pull request merge breaking a later one, so we developed an internal tool to support this need. From there, we asked ourselves if others could benefit from this feature, and if so, we’d ship it. And thus merge queue was shipped.

We keep the spirit of "computer club," a group of passionate geeks, alive and well. We allow Hubbers to self-identify their interest in a feature or product, provide early access to features, and look to work their feedback into the product. Codespaces came about from a computer club, and some recent Copilot features have followed the same path.

A remote-first organization since our founding, GitHub has developed a comprehensive set of communication practices to support asynchronous, scalable, and inclusive collaboration. Drawing from the open source community’s emphasis on documentation and asynchronous workflows, GitHub has formalized these strategies into a public guide called "How we communicate." Many of these practices have been adopted from innersource.

By using tools like issues, pull requests, and discussions—not just for code, but for planning and team communication—we've built a culture that values transparency, autonomy, and adaptability. This framework was created through collaboration across over 100 engineers, establishing guiding principles such as “Be asynchronous first,” “Write things down,” and “Make work visible.” In this episode of Beyond the Commit, we share these GitHub best practices and how you could enhance the way your organization creates software.

To learn more and continue your journey, explore the resources below:

Insights

Docs

Want to learn more about the strategic role of AI and other innovations at GitHub? Explore Executive Insights for more thought leadership on the future of technology and business.