GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team

Sam Lambert joined GitHub in 2013 as the company’s first database administrator, and is now the company’s director of technology. In this interview, he discusses how the service — which now boasts more than 10 million users and 25 million projects — is able to keep on scaling with a relatively simple technology stack. He also talks about GitHub’s largely officeless workplace — about 60 percent of its employees work remotely, using a powerful homemade chatbot, called Hubot can do basically everything in GitHub. You can ask Hubot where a specific member of staff is and it will show you where they are in the world or what floor they’re on in one of our offices, for example.

There’s probably about 40 different provisioning commands. You can do a MySQL stack. You can do failovers, you can drop tables, you can backup tables, you can clone, you can run migrations, you can do everything. You can do mitigation of attacks.

Basically, everything you could ever possibly imagine to do in our infrastructure, you can do via Hubot. There are zero requirements to interface with any code. You can run it all through Hubot.