How Dominion Enterprises uses GitHub

Hero image for the story: Dominion Enterprises

Dominion Enterprises (DE) is a leading marketing services and publishing company that works across several industries and more than one hundred offices worldwide. Their distributed technical teams support and develop a range of websites including ForRent.com, Boats.com, and Homes.com. Altogether, DE sites see tens of millions of unique visitors per month.

Company details

Industry: Marketing
Company size: 500+
Location: Norfolk, VA

The challenge

Each site has a development team with unique needs and workflows. According to the Director of DevOps Services Guillermo Fisher, "all of our businesses run very independently. They have their own goals, projects, and budgets—but we share resources and knowledge of what works across teams."

For Guillermo, choosing a version control platform for DE meant finding a common denominator that met the needs of all of the company's businesses. His team needed a platform that was flexible enough to support a variety of workflows—and that provided DE developers around the world with a secure place to share code and work together.

GitHub Enterprise has allowed us to store our company's source code in a central, corporately controlled system. - Joe Fuller, CIO

Building on what developers already knew

Guillermo and other developers throughout DE were already using GitHub.com—so when the time came to adopt a new version control platform, GitHub Enterprise seemed like an intuitive choice.

Guillermo explained: "After a tech audit, we found that a lot of our divisions were already using GitHub.com. We wanted to allow people to keep using it behind our firewall, in a way that met our security standards. Once the decision was made, they quickly started migrating code. Now we have most of our code in one place, and it's all secured."

Adopting a familiar platform has also made onboarding easier for new employees. Instead of learning three different version control systems, they only have to use the GitHub interface they're familiar with, and they can start contributing code right away.

Training for success

Although many developers at DE were familiar with GitHub, Guillermo and his team were diligent about finding skill gaps. "We did find out that there were people using Git and GitHub who didn't really know the technologies intimately enough to be successful with them."

Several teams at DE had independently started training classes in Git and GitHub. After seeing various groups take on training, Guillermo worked with his CIO and DE's IT training department to get everyone up to speed. They started hosting GitHub Training sessions twice per year for all developers who wanted to learn more or had never used GitHub before.

Now that nearly all of our repositories have been migrated over to git… and managing access and collaboration through GitHub Enterprise, we've really been able to leverage a consistent version control setup and tools such as Jenkins-CI to manage environment updates and deployments. - Michael Berry, Automation Test Engineer

Collaboration across 45 websites

With 45 websites, it was important to DE to choose a platform that made working together possible. This wasn't just a matter of sharing DE's open source projects on GitHub.com. They also had to combat the implications of storing private code "publicly" to make their work more transparent across the company.

Now that DE has migrated most of its repositories to Git, the benefits are becoming apparent. Having all of their code in one place makes it easier for teams to collaborate on projects—they've been collaborating better and more efficiently than they used to.