<I actually wrote this several weeks ago, but then life got in the way. I think it is still relevant.>
This is the first in a (hopefully) recurring theme of posts discussing patterns I’m seeing in startup companies.
For the past few months I’ve seen a number of companies that can be described as Github for X. Basically an open storage platform where people can fork off projects. While I’ve seen a bunch of others, some good examples are:
- Legal documents
- Music
- Data Sets
Partly this is probably due to Githubs big fundraise. But another aspect is probably that coders are starting to branch out to other domains and they are trying to bring their tools with them.
Back in the dark ages we used RCS & CVS to track source changes. They were hard to use in teams and didn’t scale well to the Internet. Today we have incredibly powerful tools with integrated sharing platforms.
For those who’ve used these tools with a distributed team you know how powerful they can be. It is only natural that people will want to bring them to other domains.
Tags: GithubForX, StartupPatterns
Keeping it simple and intuitive is so difficult, yet so important.