![]() ![]() Company artists have developed a cartoon-ish alter-ego for the bot that looks kinda like a steel-plated flying Minion-without the goofy factor (see the image above, pulled from the Hubot homepage). If you walk around the GitHub offices, you'll see Hubot stickers on laptops. GitHub is five years into using it, and it's deeply ingrained in the company's culture. "I can return to that point in time," he says. If Lambert wants to see what happened one day last week when the company updated a bunch of servers, he merely opens a chat log. What's more, unlike a command line, Hubot and the GitHub chat client provide an easy-to-access log of all past messages. It helps you work through things as a team." ![]() "When something goes wrong, everyone piles into the infrastructure room, and you can watch the remediation of the incident happen. "You get this incredible context for what you're doing and what your team is doing," Lambert says. When it does your bidding, Hubot appears among the other chatter, represented by his own robot-like icon. You open up a chat room and send Hubot a note, and this becomes part of a larger discussion. But at the same time, it feels conversational, in large part because you send commands to Hubot as you would send messages to any human. Well, what she really says is: "/blue jeans me." Hubot springs into action whenever it sees a "/." The system has a "command line" feel to it, meaning that, much like with old school computer terminals, you have to use specific commands for it to work. And as time goes on, this becomes a central record of (just about) everything that happens inside the company. But in the years since, Hubot has evolved into something that supports everybody inside the company-not only handling a wide range of tasks but providing a conversational context for those tasks. Simply by sending a message to Hubot-much as they'd send a message to anyone else from inside the GitHub chat client-engineers could update the operating systems driving GitHub's servers, delete data from the databases, or take entire servers offline. About five years ago, a guy named Ryan Tomayko built Hubot as an easier way for the company's engineers to manage and modify all the hardware and software underpinning. He's a bit of software that plugs into the GitHub chat system. Sam Lambert, the director of systems at GitHub, calls Hubot "the hardest working GitHubber." That's a company-wide in-joke. In other words, Hubot is good for a pick me up. Hubot can even tell a joke or find an animated GIF of something completely frivolous, like a dance party. When prompted, Hubot can also post a tweet, unveil a graph of the latest traffic numbers, or boot up some servers to accommodate more traffic. ![]() If they need something translated from Spanish, Hubot will translate. ![]() If they need a dial-in number for an afternoon conference call, Hubot can provide it. From the same chat program, GitHubbers can ask Hubot which decidedly hip San Francisco food trucks are set up down the street-and Hubot will tell them. But that's only a small part of what Hubot can do. When you sign into the iPad sitting on the President's desk, Hubot runs a software script that shuttles those notifications through the company's online chat system. As you check in, Hubot sends notifications to everyone you're scheduled to meet with. But as you approach and check in for an afternoon meeting, the decor isn't nearly as interesting as the technology. The reception desk is, yes, a replica of the President's desk. The lobby is a wonderfully amusing recreation of the Oval Office, right down to the striped wallpaper, the gold curtains, and the American flag in the corner. When you walk into the San Francisco headquarters of GitHub- the startup that sits at the heart of the software universe-it looks as if you've walked into the White House. ![]()
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