Believe it or not, just over a year ago, GitHub Pages, the documentation hosting service that powers nearly three-quarters of a million sites, was little more than a 100-line shell script. Today, it's a fully independent, feature-rich OAuth application that effortlessly handles well over a quarter million requests per minute.
We wanted to take a look back at what we learned from leveling up the service over a six month period. What's GitHub Pages GitHub Pages is GitHub's static-site hosting service. It’s used by government agencies like the White House to publish policy, by big companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Netflix to showcase their open source efforts, and by popular projects like Bootstrap, D3, and Leaflet to host their software documentation.
Whenever you push to a specially named branch of your repository, the content is run through the Jekyll static site generator, and served via its own domain. Eating our own ice cream At GitHub, we're a big fan of eating our own ice cream (some call it dogfooding). Many of us have our own, personal sites hosted on GitHub Pages, and many GitHub-maintained projects like Hubot and Electron, along with sites like help.github.com, take advantage of the service as well. This means that when the product slips below our own heightened expectations, we're the first to notice.
We like to say that there's a Venn diagram of things that each of us are passionate about, and things that are important to GitHub. Whenever there's significant overlap, it's win-win, and GitHubbers are encouraged to find time to pursue their passions.
The recent improvements to GitHub Pages, a six-month sprint by a handful of Hubbers, was one such project. Here's a quick look back at eight lessons we learned:
