Enabling Collaboration

With over 30 million monthly website visitors, is considered GitHub as one of the most successful Open Source-projects in recent years.

GitHub was founded in 2008 by the US-Americans Tom Preston-Werner, P.J. Hyett and Chris Wanstrath in San Francisco founded. The Idea it was, Software-builds, the software development process that automatically generates a finished application program.

In the meantime GitHub the largest source code host, and Wanstrath finds himself on the Forbes list of the richest U.S. Americans under 40 - with an estimated fortune of $500 million.

GitHub, which is initially a social media platform for professional Software Developer. Similar to Twitter, members can follow each other, rate the work of others, and download updates for projects, as well as communicate privately and publicly.

GitHub is based on Git, a Open Source-code management system developed by Linus Torvald, one of the fathers of the Linux-kernels, was developed.

Git as version management

As a decentralized system, Git makes it possible to create and manage different versions of files. In addition to the pure changes, further information about a version is stored, such as date and time, author or change notes.

GitHub acts as an online host for Git Repositories. A repository is a directory in which digital objects can be stored. GitHub behaves like a server for collaborative projects - and thus enables social coding. The use is free of charge, as long as the code is shared.

Since the platform is relatively intuitive to use, it is a powerful Tool for version control and for Collaboration have become. GitHub enables Software developers, to connect across organizational boundaries and collaborate with the greatest possible transparency.

In the course of the digital transformation, more and more companies are becoming software companies, even outside the traditional IT industry. Many of them have already GitHub as a standard for socialCollaboration-Processes implemented.

Software development covers all areas of life

In the next few years, the digital transformation will not only affect companies.

Kakul Srivastava, vice president of product management at GitHub:

"More and more people will use software code as a matter of course in their everyday work without thinking of themselves as developers"

The task, he said, is to provide the best possible support for this process and to further simplify cooperation.

Social Coding at SAP

SAP has also recognized the trend. Back in 2014, the company set itself the task of improving the developer experience.

The challenge was that SAP has a very integrated stack where teams develop their applications. SAP is also built on an integrated version management system and development mechanism.

In the course of the Cloud-The transformation of the company has given individual teams more and more responsibility. The opening up to Open Source and GitHub According to Thomas Jansen, Product Manager at SAP, this not only enables better collaboration between teams.

Since Git has established itself as a standard in the scene, it is now also easier to integrate new employees into the workflows more quickly.

SAP wants to work even more closely with the developer community in the future. With the update of the HanaCloud-platform, for example, SAP recently introduced Cloud-portal content such as templates for apps and websites of the Open Source-Community about GitHub available.

As SAP experts and partners contribute more and more content, the SAP community is able to design user-friendly interfaces for businesses.