It looks cool, but be very careful about using it (in a browser, at least). Browsers have super-fast JSON parsers and parsing msgpack is much, much slower than parsing good old JSON.

This great comment (from 201 days ago) is exactly about this issue:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4091051

I quote a bit of it here:

    JSON size: 386kb
    MsgPack size: 332kb
    Difference: -14%

    Encoding with JSON.stringify 4 ms
    Encoding with msgpack.pack 73 ms
    Difference: 18.25x slower

    Decoding with JSON.parse 4 ms
    Decoding with msgpack.unpack 13 ms 
    Difference: 3.25x slower

and also this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4093077

   MessagePack is not smaller than gzip'd JSON
   MessagePack is not faster than JSON when a browser is involved
   MessagePack is not human readable
   MessagePack has issues with UTF-8
   Small packets also have significant TCP/IP overhead

I'm quoted in the article and I wanted to clear one thing up that was missing from it.

When bots get reported to us by people using GitHub our support folks reach out to the bot account owner and encourage them to build a GitHub service[1] instead. As a service, the same functionality would still be available to everyone using GitHub, but it would be opt-in instead.

A few months ago we heard from some developers of service integrations that beyond the existing API features, it would be handy to be able to provide a form of "status" for commits. We added the commit status API [2] in September to accommodate that. We're always open to feedback on how the API and service integrations can improve.

The point is, GitHub services are a much better way to build integrations on GitHub.

[1] https://github.com/github/github-services [2] https://github.com/blog/1227-commit-status-api

The book that has changed my life the most, so far, has been The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman.

In 2010 I started a job that was far, far ahead of my skillset. I'd written fewer than 10,000 lines of code in my life, and I was completely ill-prepared for the work I was supposed to be doing. I picked up SICP about a month or two into that job.

Fast forward a year, and I felt that I knew more about programming than half the people I worked with, and I'd moved to a smaller, more awesome company doing work that I think is much more fun.

A year since then and I've picked up half a dozen new languages, given talks at user groups on some of them. Next year I'm aiming for conferences.

Pick up this book. It gives you superpowers.

I'm also a 15 years old teenager living in Argentina, but here things are somewhat different.

First, no one has a "real" smartphone, most are cheap Nokia phones with some applications for Facebook: People who have money usually buy BlackBerries, I have a Samsung Galaxy Ace (Being an Android fan) that I bought in Spain: but truth is smartphones are really expensive.

Facebook... everything is about Facebook here: Teenagers don't use any other IM service besides Facebook Messenger, they even use it in their phones. I find it extremely painful to communicate because I need to keep a Facebook window tab opened if I want to chat with someone (Well, I use Pidgin now).

I don't even go into Facebook, the Facebook feed looks like browsing /r/funny New in Reddit, people don't post original content: Just memes copied from the internet and cristian stuff.

People tend to have a lot of friends in Facebook: I think I don't have more than 50 friends: Those who I really would like to talk with me and have access to my pictures.

What people really use here is ask.fm , I'm not sure if people in other countries use it: but the basic idea is that you create an account and people (Logged, or as Anonymous) post you questions and you answer: Then it gets posted in your Facebook.

I don't understand why would anyone want to use that service: The questions are dumb and nosense. Other questions are personal, and some people still answer that. Nowadays most of my Facebook feed is 75% ask.fm links, it's really annoying.

Other services? Some people use Twitter, but not really; mostly teenagers following One Direction and Justin Bieber.

Blogging? Nah, no one reads blogs: they don't like reading anything larger than a couple lines of text (I think this: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma... can be relevant).

Youtube... they like dumb vlogs and some people like gameplays, I find this kind of videos very annoying and dumb.

Oh, not even mention Mail: most of people can't remember their passwords, for me, Mail is vital. Tumblr? No one knows what that is. Ah, no one uses Instagram either, and I'm glad...

So resuming: Teenagers only use the internet for Facebook, and, sometimes, reading the Wikipedia (When they have to do something for school) and that's really bad: They have a wonderful tool that they don't want to use, although the language (Most of teenagers don't have a good level of English, or at least they refuse to read English) can be an impediment.

For me the internet is amazing: you can learn whatever you want, for free, thanks to tools like Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity: But people refuse to, and the language is not the only issue. I think we should focus our knowledge into motivating the Teenagers to get interested into this, instead of developing more applications like Poke or a Facetime killer.