You Are What You Build: Making Your Code More Human | GitHub’s Christina Entcheva

**Nathan Harvey** (0:00)
Hi, this is Nathan Harvey. I'm a lead developer advocate for Dora and Google Cloud. Dora is the DevOps research and assessment group. And as you may have seen in the Dev Interrupted newsletter, we need your help this year with the Accelerate State of DevOps survey. This survey is brought to you by Dora, Google Cloud and Linear B. The survey itself takes just 15 minutes to fill out and your anonymous input helps the entire industry understand how to make the software world better. There are no right or wrong answers. We just want to hear about how you and your team develop and deliver software. And you know, considering some of the questions might just help your team identify some areas to improve starting tomorrow.
You can fill out the survey at bit.ly slash 2023, Sodor Sponsors. We'll put a link in the show notes.
Really appreciate you taking those 15 minutes to share your insights with the entire industry.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:09)
Welcome back to Dev Interrupted at Lead Dev New York. I'm very excited to be joined by Christina Entcheva. She is the Director of Software Engineering at GitHub.
And I want to start things off with a bit of a spicy question.
What is the secret sauce at GitHub?

**Christina Entcheva** (1:22)
Well, hello. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Yep, like you said, my name is Christina. I'm a Director of Engineering at GitHub. Very happy to be here. Love that spicy take. Let's just get right into it. There are many things that I think contribute to the unique situation at GitHub, but I really think our secret sauce is our culture. I know that that's like probably super cliche to say, I think in this case it's true. I do think that GitHub culture is a little bit different than your kind of everyday company. We bias very heavily towards asynchronous communication. We bias very heavily towards working out in the open. So it's really important for leaders especially, but for everybody to kind of show their work, show it early, sharing whips, whether that be documents or drafts, PRs as early as possible is something that like we really strive towards consistently.
And both with PRs and documents and like any other artifacts of information, like having that written artifact is really important. And it allows for that like asynchronous communication.
So people can absorb context at the time that's best for them. And it kind of like frees us from the stronghold of meetings as a conduit of information, which like it just doesn't scale. I think it's, you know, it's not incredibly unique, like other companies do this well, but I think that-

**SPEAKER_3** (2:49)
But doing it well is really hard.

**Christina Entcheva** (2:51)
I think doing it well is hard doing it consistently and certainly like working with folks who might not be accustomed to that type of culture. It can be a transition for folks, but I think it just, it pays dividends over and over and over. Again, like meetings as a conduit for information just does not scale.
We're an asynchronous remote company. So we have a workhorse that's all over the world. It just like literally doesn't work.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:17)
You need to create focus time, right? You have big problems to solve and meetings cut into that focus time. It's a tax on communication. And so if you can solve that another way, I love that approach.
What attracted you and kind of like led you to end up at GitHub and in this like quite unique, but like special culture?

**Christina Entcheva** (3:36)
Yeah, that's a question. So I guess, you know, before I joined GitHub, I've been at GitHub just under a year now, started in May of 2022 And prior to that, I was a director of engineering at Thoughtbot, which is a software consultancy in the Ruby on Rails space.
And the culture at Thoughtbot is actually very similar, very biased towards public asynchronous communication.
And that was actually one of the big factors I had been at Thoughtbot, I guess, over five years by the time I left, but I had been in the director of engineering role for about 10 months. So, you know, I was happy there, things were good. I just kind of, you know, I felt the pull of GitHub.
Someone reached out to me and they kind of nerd sniped me. And, you know, one thing led to another, but one thing I was extremely motivated by is that same culture, right? Like, transparency is my top value as a leader. So I definitely saw that in GitHub in that kind of, like I said, showing your work early type of culture. And that was a big thing that pulled me over. And then also like solving problems at scale, right? GitHub is at a certain scale where certain challenges come up that you might not get in a smaller company. And that's just really motivating and exciting to work on.