How Hootsuite uses GitHub

Since 2009, Hootsuite has grown from a basic Twitter tool into a comprehensive platform with more than 700 employees and over 10 million users. As the most widely used social media relationship platform in the world, the development team manages significant growth while building the software that powers the platform.

Industry: Marketing
Company Size: 500+
Location: Vancouver, BC

Consolidating version control

With over five years of growth behind them, Hootsuite's development team decided to establish new standards and practices for software development. Multiple acquisitions and reorganizations had left them with several version control systems in place, making it difficult to provide visibility into development work and measure efficiency.

In 2014, the team began looking for alternatives and chose GitHub Enterprise Server. The decision came from the development team themselves. When the need to consolidate platforms became clear, they started a public thread to build a case for using the same software they used for personal projects and previous jobs. For open source and a huge number of software development organizations, GitHub is the gold standard—developers are immersed in it.

For the management team, the decision came down to choosing a tool the team was already familiar with and trusting them to find the way of working that made them happiest and most productive. From a development perspective, they love it—and the organization has made gains in efficiency by providing developers with an interface and way of working they already know and understand.

One secure place for code

Consolidating all of Hootsuite's code onto one version control platform made their work easier to track. Using Enterprise Server provided a single, searchable index of Hootsuite's code, a consolidated dashboard, and reduced the risk of projects getting lost or falling through the cracks. From a senior management perspective, having all product code in one place and all systems on their own infrastructure provides greater peace of mind.

Built-in compliance

As Hootsuite has grown, compliance has become increasingly important. The company has been accredited with a number of compliance certifications, and as part of those certifications, their development processes and production infrastructure had to be examined by third parties.

The team built auditable and compliant processes on top of Enterprise Server. With traceable pull requests and corresponding commits for each ticket, they were able to easily navigate the audit process and demonstrate their preparedness.

Supporting continuous delivery

Hootsuite migrated to Enterprise Server with their workflow and projects in mind. The team gradually moved their code, starting with the easiest parts before working up to more complex ones. They began with simple internal tooling and blogs before migrating their flagship dashboard product.

The development team updates their platform multiple times a day using a continuous delivery model. They use Enterprise Server with a continuous integration service to support this approach, as Enterprise Server fully supports automated QA systems.