meta

(I was CTO of Artsy then.) tl;dr The README became possible because Artsy is open-source by default, and someone just decided one day to create a repo and some content, and didn't need permission to do so. It's also the repo that most new hires read before they even apply to the job, and they don't need permission to make changes either. GitHub workflow is how everything gets done. More practically, check out https://github.com/artsy/meta/pull/1, which is one of the repos that merged into the handbook via https://github.com/artsy/README/pull/1. Also note that Artsy was founded in 2010. This handbook in its current iteration is 7-8 years in, but its content goes back to ~2011 in some kind of evolution. You'll want to check out https://artsy.github.io/blog/archives/ as well.

This is really cool work - if you're ever in New York City and want to chat Art/Tech come by the Artsy offices ( https://github.com/artsy/meta/blob/master/meta/happy_hour.md )