The Geek Talk

Who’s Chris?

Chris is a 24 year old programmer living in San Francisco, CA. He works at GitHub, which he co-founded, and likes coffee.

Github?

We’re a small company based in San Francisco making the life of every developer and designer easier. We want you to focus on your work, not the process.

At it simplest it’s a site for hosting your code. But when used properly, it’s a better way to contribute to open source and private code.

We also do Git training and travel the world speaking about development, collaboration, stuff like that.

What does your typical day look like?

I don’t really have a typical day. I can tell you my ideal day, but it’s pretty rare.

Ideally I wake up around 7am, get some exercise, make coffee, eat breakfast, then hop online and catch up on anything that happened overnight. Then I’ll check my email, do that boring stuff, then maybe hop into our Support site and answer some questions / requests. I also like to get pull requests and other open source work done in the morning.

I try to do a little bit of open source work each day because it’s my passion and my job. Maybe I’ll spend the morning fixing small bugs or tweaking the site for people, especially if the request sounds awesome and is simple enough.

After lunch I like to sink my teeth into a big project I can work on for a few hours at a time. Around 5 or 6pm I’ll check my email again, figure out what I have to do the next day, then call it a day.

Of course, that’s rare. I may be working until 3am and then sleep in until 10am or 11am. I may have a meeting or have to be somewhere that takes up most of my afternoon. There may be a fire that I have to put out – for example, I respond to security emails as soon as I can. This often means dropping whatever I’m doing and fixing the hole or perceived exploit as quickly as possible. That’ll really throw your neatly scheduled day off track.

You know how it is.

What are the tools you couldn’t live without?

Unix and Launchbar.

What do you do in your free time?

I love playing guitar. I’ve been playing since I was 12 and am really into metal. Between the Buried and Me, August Burns Red, the Sword, and Protest the Hero are some of my current favorites. I spend a lot of time writing music as well as learning songs by these bands (and others).

I also love to read. Right now I’m completely engrossed by George R R Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire.” I’m a huge fantasy / sci-fi fan and it’s pretty much the greatest thing I’ve ever read. I’m not done with it yet, but I’m already sad about being caught up and having nothing left to read.

Writing is also a hobby of mine. I used to have a frequently updated programming blog but don’t currently do any major technical writing. If I do, it’s for the GitHub Blog. I write fiction when I have time but have yet to publish it anywhere.

I hope to publish a novel at some point, just for fun. I always wanted to be a writer growing up but ended up a programmer.

Current favorite apps?

I just started using Things.app and really love it. It has as much or as little organization as you want. For me, it fits really well. The killer feature is the quick-entry window, though. It works pretty much exactly how I want it to. I’ve tried some others (like The Hit List) and while they may have better features in some areas, their quick-entry windows all fall short of Things’.

I’m a huge Aquamacs fan, too. I know a lot of hardcore Emacs users look down on it, but it has all the features I want and is just OS Xy enough to fit.

Spark is also a favorite. I love mapping my F keys (F1, F2, etc) to apps, AppleScripts, you name it. It’s nice to execute common actions with a single keystroke.

Scott Chacon’s showoff is very promising, too. I’ve already made one presentation in it and plan to use it for all my talks this year. I wish I had thought of the idea years ago – being able to customize your presentation software is such a great idea if you give a lot of presentations.

What OSs do you prefer?

OS X for desktop, Gentoo Linux for servers.

Small pic for your Workplace?

Favorite: Languages, JS Framework?

I really love Ruby and Python. There are so similar but so different, so it’s really interesting to learn about both communities and languages. I’m also a huge fan of JavaScript.

We use jQuery on GitHub but I am pretty familiar with Prototype and MooTools. I like learning about popular frameworks and other languages – just because I don’t use MooTools every day isn’t an excuse to be totally ignorant of it.

What’s do you prefer, the freelance work or the full time employee?

I prefer being a co-owner of my own business ;)

Freelance was very stressful for me. I think I enjoyed being a full time employee more – it’s easier to really put your heart into your work and take ownership, which I need to do. It’s hard for me to work on a project I don’t care about.

Your personnel projects and goals for 2010?

I want to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the 1. I want to visit Amsterdam and Mexico again.

More importantly, I want to spend every day making GitHub more awesome. This year is really our time to shine: Git keeps growing and we have an amazing team. I think we are going to do some great things.

Chris Wanstrath on Twitter.