🐙 Github: How we use it

GitHub, often misunderstood as complex, offers a range of features that can significantly streamline our workflows. By automating repetitive tasks, it frees up our time to focus on engaging and creative work, enabling us to move beyond routine operations.

This guide is the fundamental rule for collaboration on our projects and is designed to give you a quick “how-to” intro.

As we know, GitHub is a project management system for software companies. And like any project management system, it evolves around issues. At Holdex, we came up with a simple framework that allows us to succeed no matter how ambitious the challenge we are facing.

To break down something complex into simple and achievable tasks (“think big, act small”), we build our issue management based on three core concepts:

1. Goal – a business aim
2. Problem – an issue that is on the way to help us achieve the goal
3. Solution – a means of solving a problem

Holdex Frameworks

Goals

As soon as you get involved in a project, you must understand the current project goal.

Investigate the conversations, make your own assessments, and figure out how things are already moving towards achieving the goal. It is crucial to understand the business context of the goal and how achieving the goal will impact the project.

Problems

Once the goal is clear, you must determine what stops you from achieving it. Typical questions to ask are:

• What’s missing on the website?
• What action the users can’t perform?

Anything that is stopping us - is a “Problem”. As team members, we find and report these problems through GitHub Issues. Sometimes, a Goal already has a few Problems reported, but it’s not always complete. We’re relying on you to support us and find these Problems.

Solutions

The third pillar of our success is to provide a solution to a specific problem. Different problems may require different sets of skills. Whether it’s code, design, or marketing material, we expect a lean and clean solution you can provide in your area of expertise.

If the source-code modification is required, the solution is presented as GitHub PR. Keep PRs small and aim to complete each PR within 3-4 hours. When creating PRs and commits, follow Conventional Commit guidelines. Make sure the name of the PR is super clean and simple.

Tips

• Ensure the quality of your work. Don’t expect someone else to review your work if the problem is solved. It’s usually a sign of poor ownership and lack of confidence unless you’re a beginner.
• Limit and scope your work to smaller deliverables. Aim to deliver something every 3-4 hours.
• Problems can be decomposed into sub-problems.
• Assign yourself to the Problem you are solving so others can see it.
• Don’t use `@ mention` when you want to thank or agree with someone. Use GitHub reaction instead.
• Leave updates regularly to keep things transparent for everyone.
• Can’t provide a Solution within a working day? Leave a note inside the Problem issue with the latest status update.