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GitHub isn't fun anymore

jaredpalmer.com

141–150 of 623 posts

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the difference for a personal user? Is gitlab better?

It's actually open source itself. I was pretty shocked to find out that GitHub isn't (it's the face of open source!).

Also owned by Microsoft.

I mean, I get the "new" Microsoft. And I get that this is mostly a street-cred move by them, and they'll try to not mess it up by interfering with it. But still. That's now. What happens when the next shake-up comes and there's a push by the accountants to make money off everything, that's the important bit.

It's like Atlassian taking over Trello. They'll mess it up, it's just a matter of when not if.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#142
> I wouldn’t be opposed to ... DMs.

They actually had these!

I used it occasionally. It was useful. They obviously removed it. Imagine being able to message anyone on the platform about their repo or code. Imagine it being easy to find how to contact someone. Now you have to rely on the user adding public contact information on their profile which is a) not required and b) not validated.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#143

Hard pass on the suggestion to add more social network features. Such features are only conducive to drama and anxiety, we need less of that not more.

I regret only that I have but one upvote to give.

I had a spare, you can have mine

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#145
If anybody ever thought of fun while using git, I would probably think that that person is a masochist. It's a tool for work.

It's actually a shame that git won over all the other DVS, because I used to find mercurial much more approachable and a lot easier to use. Mercurial maybe could be called fun, but definitely not git.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the gitlab CI service makes a lot more sense though, github has this weird concept of "Actions", and running CI/CD/... is some "shortcut" that was added as an afterthought because nobody could figure out how github actions are supposed to work for something simple as "please just run this script after each push".

I'm not sure what you're referring to, it's very easy to run an Action after each push? on: push: branches: - "**"

"Proper" CI/CD support was only added after users complained that Github Actions are too complicated to use for CI/CD, see:

https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-supports-c...

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#147
This [1] was posted here some time ago. It's been pretty useful for me for discovering projects, and it seems to be good at bringing actually trending projects to the top. E.g. at the beginning of the covid situation, you could see a bunch of dashboards, news trackers, or scripts to buy face masks etc. at the top.

[1] https://trends.now.sh/

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#148

Hard pass on the suggestion to add more social network features. Such features are only conducive to drama and anxiety, we need less of that not more.

I didn’t really get the impression here that Jared wanted a social network. He just wanted a better mechanism for discovering good quality and interesting projects. Popularity is often one good signal.

I'm not sure Github stars were/are ever an indicator of "good quality" or even "interesting".

And I think the Web Development community could do with a decent break from "new" as well. What would be great is if we could just prune some of the gajillion frameworks and libraries already out there, and spend some time to make the ones we keep decently robust and elegant.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#149
GitHub was never fun. They don't care about spamming, maybe they even endorse it.

I'm not active on GitHub. I have an account, sometimes I file a bug or so.

Every now and then I get "invited" to some GitHub project I've never heard of. One contributor, zero stars, pure spam.

I always block those and report them as spammers.

GitHub, without fail, gets back to me saying that "oh, you can block him". That's it.

Maybe you could just stop people from spam-inviting hundreds of others? Maybe you could not allow invitations of people who never interacted with the person or his repo in any way?

But I hope they at least fixed their also very annoying notification bug where they sent me a mail that I was mentioned in a commit:

Someone had committed a binary file (image or whatever), and in there was actually a two byte sequence fitting my GitHub user name (two character name).

That's just idiotic. A few bytes in a binary do not "mention" anyone.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offence, but as someone who has only ever used github and gitlab, can you clarify why it's uncool?

Their abrupt cease of support for mercurial damaged it beyond repair for me and many others. They didn't even offer to migrate stuff with the click of a button, people started writing scripts to migrate, and while you are migrating, why not to GitHub which in the meantime also gained free private repositories?

> Their abrupt cease of support for mercurial damaged it beyond repair for me and many others.

I'm not the biggest Atlassian fan, but they posted in August last year, gave 10 months notice and cited that less than 1% of new repos being created are using mercurial as their primary reason for doing so. If you cared about a project, almost a year is plenty of time to move it. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to sunset a feature that is not widely used by your users, not widely used outside of your userbase, and that requires ongoing maintenance that the other 99% of repositories could benefit from instead.

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