How XING uses GitHub

XING integrates open and closed source code to build collaborative workflows everyone can use—from project planning to QA.

Company Overview

Company Size 1,400+ Customer Since 2011 Number of Seats 725+ Total Repos 12,500+

Searching for a new job can fill up a work week's worth of hours. XING is a social networking site that connects professionals across Europe with opportunities to build a better working life. The platform's engineering organization is distributed across Europe, with central offices in Hamburg and growing teams in Munich, Vienna, Porto, Barcelona, and Valencia, with an expanding emphasis on mobile experiences.

Building Collaborative Workflows

Two engineering leaders behind XING's mobile infrastructure are Senior Developer Jason Franklin and Alexander Greim, Director Engineering, Mobile and Web Frontends. Their teams manage Android and iOS packaging and releasing, along with the tooling and infrastructure needed to ship web and mobile experiences.

After nearly a decade at XING, Greim witnessed the company's infrastructure evolution, including early adoption of GitHub almost 10 years ago. "We started out with Subversion and Mercurial, then had a lot of long conversations about whether or not we should use Mercurial or switch to Git. In the end, we just chose Git, and it was great. With GitHub topping our list, we decided to adopt a forward-thinking way of building software instead of spending our resources on custom tooling."

From the beginning, Greim was excited for his team to work together on code in a social, collaborative environment. "Of course, we started with developers. Then the use of GitHub continued to expand throughout the organization until it was an essential piece of how we develop software—not just for code, but for collaboration and automation."

As the team expands beyond Hamburg, Franklin appreciates the reliability, flexibility, and context GitHub brings to distributed work. "When I'm discussing work with remote developers, I can just send a GitHub link—and it really makes collaboration very easy."

Use cases have extended beyond code collaboration. "It's not just developers using it—there's QA, of course, so testers and quality experts. Designers also utilize it heavily and engineering managers have been exploring it as well." With tens of thousands of comments across issues and pull requests, conversations around code and other work continue to grow.

Release Management and Code Review

Developers at XING work across different release cycles. Many apps are released multiple times a day, while mobile apps follow weekly or biweekly cadences. GitHub serves as a single platform for code and documentation reviews and knowledge sharing across all teams. Pull requests form the foundation for code review and release management, while GitHub Gists serve as a medium for taking notes or sharing code snippets.

With an ecosystem of more than 2,000 active hooks, XING integrates with tools and solutions while exploring new apps and services. For CI, they use Jenkins to report CI status back to GitHub across the company and run regular code health checks to ensure quality and security standards.

The result is a flexible, modern development culture based on autonomy and constructive feedback. "The dialogue is different now," observed Greim. "Overall, GitHub helps teams work together that wouldn't have worked together before."

Open Source and Code Accessibility

GitHub allows XING to securely integrate third-party technologies, leverage open source projects, and find code within their organization and beyond. "The biggest advantage is that it makes code accessible across programming languages, across all platforms," said Greim. "The technologies we're using and contribute to grow on GitHub. If you're working with open source projects, libraries, or frameworks, you have to use GitHub."

As the team incorporates open source code, they've dedicated time to contributing back to projects like Rabbit MQ, AMP, and Kubernetes. Teams are also open sourcing their work at github.com/XING, sharing about 200 projects so far, from hack projects to helpful gems.

Hiring and Onboarding

Discoverability is key to DevOps at XING, but also to hiring, onboarding, and continued learning. Most applicants already know GitHub, so profiles are available to browse and review. They're well prepared to work through end-to-end interview challenges in pull requests, with code going through the same review process as full-time employees. Teams use the GitHub API to provide custom private coding challenges for applicants.

Once developers start at XING, a single, searchable codebase allows new hires to ramp up quickly and become productive sooner. The team has set up asynchronous onboarding through GitHub, saving time and resources on workshops and classes. Developers also use the platform as a learning resource for building software at the company. "There are solutions specific to XING that you won't find on the internet," explained Franklin.

Documentation and Knowledge Sharing

Even developers with several years at the company need refreshers as they try new roles and technologies. Franklin and Greim credit GitHub in creating comprehensive internal technical documentation. "Our documentation is close to the code," explained Greim, "otherwise there is a constant risk that it runs out of sync. So it's better to use GitHub Pages than Confluence."

Franklin finds the text search particularly useful for referencing infrequent yet forgettable tasks. "GitHub is my go-to place. There is stuff you do every few months and forget, like renewing push certificates or provisioning profiles for iOS. It's great to be able to look it up and remember how it goes—these resources are super valuable." Searching GitHub Pages also helps developers find code, email templates, and more.

Impact on Engineering Culture

After nearly a decade on GitHub, the platform has become a central point for communication, feedback, and learning at XING. Greim believes the engineering team may have grown around it. "Having GitHub has been critical. It shaped the way we work at XING."

"The technologies we're using and contribute to grow on GitHub. If you're working with open source projects, libraries, or frameworks, you have to use GitHub."