As we here at Flatsourcing are big fans of GitHub and recommend it as our code hosting repository of choice for most clients, I thought it would be worthwhile to pass along some info on their 2009 contest.

For your chance to win a bottle of 20 year old Pappy Van Winkle Bourbon AND a free large GitHub account for life, just follow their simple contest guidelines:

The contest is pretty simple. You download our sample data which includes a file containing which users are watching which repositories, and a file listing 4,788 of those users. Then you write a program to recommend up to 10 repositories for each of the test users. You get a point for each time one of your guesses was an entry we removed.

For more on the contest check out the official GitHub contest page.
For more information on how we use GitHub and our process, give us a shout and we’ll be happy to help.

We’re now trying to collect emails and dates of births of those who work within the company at least to congratulate them on birthdays with even more informal type of congratulations Stay tuned and let us know your contact info in case we ask, don’t worry

In some recent calls with prospective clients I seem to have spent some extra time discussing the benefits of our decision to focus on the Agile Development methodology. More and more people are beginning to understand the benefits of agile versus the time and effort spent in the past focused on scope documents, dense detailed project specifications, and trying to peek into the future so they can plan accordingly.

I’ve found that the simple 4 points found in the Agile Manfiesto help explain our choice and picque the interest of those unfamiliar with agile.

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

While these 4 points get to the core of agile, there is also an understanding that all of the items on the right side are in themselves valuable, but only within the context of the greater goal of developing a meaningful end result.

Tools and process are very important, and if you would like to know more about ours, check out Chris’s post from earlier this week.

For more resources on Agile Development, check out the links below:

http://www.agilealliance.org/
http://www.targetprocess.com/blog/
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/agile-methods.html