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GitHub isn't fun anymore

jaredpalmer.com

471–480 of 623 posts

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use then? Gitlab? Personal servers?

There's also sourcehut: https://git.sr.ht/

I can't recommend Sourcehut enough!

The git.sr.ht service is just the tip of the iceberg, though. It also provides you with CI, issue tracking, mailing lists... And it works perfectly in Lynx so you don't even have to leave command line to use the browser interface.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#472
post #288

I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool , though. Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts). I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool. I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of…

Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old. For adults, there lies incredible satisfaction in mastering any but the most exploitative professions or jobs and fulfilling them dutifully, even if they are be no means "fun".

what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"

A couple years ago I dubbed this trend "Flanders Computing" [1]. I haven't really given much thought about its origins, but it's probably got to do with the increasing demand for happiness that we Americans hold dear.

Collectively I think it's entered the American psyche that the answer to happiness is to avoid anything that makes us anxious or uncomfortable, which results in that toddler-level approach in many things. i.e. Ban things labeled "toxic", ban the boo-boos, keep everyone safe with happy feelings in this space only. But admittedly my thoughts are incomplete.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#473
post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read that thread a few times and I see the people requesting the change doing so in a calm, reasonable manner. The only non-productive posts I see are from people who are vehemently and acerbically against it.

The tagline of the forked repo is "Fork of Rubocop without all of the 'cop' stuff. ACAB." ( https://github.com/ruby-lint/ruby_lint ) From the README: >The goal of this project is for the rubocop folks to merge this back into rubocop project, and rename its org/repo/domain/etc >The goal is NOT to maintain an ongoing parity fork of an active project Insanely entitled in my book and far from what I'd call calm or reason…

It is the opposite of calm or reasonable. It is impulsive and downright flabbergasting that one would be so entitled to expect this kind of change to be merged into mainline rubocop backed behind such weak arguments.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#474
It's hard for me to see how the "fun" factor of GitHub could be concentrated on the "Trending" page.

For me it's a place to do development. And it's been improving steadily on that.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#475
post #427
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's false in the first 10 comments > emilyst commented 11 days ago I live in a country with a real dictator (although not on paper), unchecked police that's just an instrument in the hands of the government, and while no one here has any fondness of the Bulgarian police as an institution or our cops, I don't have any issues with the words "police" and "cop". "works on my machine" Additionally I haven't seen a sing…

They high-road the guy until their's no room left for discussion. They stop just short of calling him a racist authoritarian for naming his package RuboCop years ago. The creator isn't even from the US, it's a bit ignorant to assume the entire world shares their personal world view, and worse to assume the rest of the world should cater to it. I am entirely sympathetic toward the US' plight right now, and we have had…

That's just what's frustrating me.

A ton of people out there want to prove to themselves more than anyone else that they care about this by doing totally meaningless things like renaming a project that has been maintained and used by thousands of people for YEARS and known throughout the entire (international) community as rubocop with all the reputation, tooling, clout, etc. built over the years, and completely destroy all of that just because you're sad and you feel like doing something to make yourself feel better.

The level of entitlement is just over the top. You don't like the name, fork it, rename it, and use that fork. Advertise it if you want. Don't come and demand from maintainers that have worked on this for years, for exactly zero dollars, to do such a thing. Honestly this is just another thing that turns me off from open source development.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#476
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before adding the newest fad features, maybe the should go back and add old fads that they missed. One big fad from 50+ years ago that I'd welcome is folders. I don't want to just have all my repositories appear in a flat list ordered by time since last update. I want to make folders so I can organize repositories by topic--just like I have my repositories organized in my computer.

This so much. Another pet peeve of mine: GitHub is terrible for the workflow that Git was originally designed for. Specifically, the issue that there's no good way to review patch series. The key here is presenting a series of patches as a whole, but allowing reviews on individual commits of the series.

This is my second or third biggest problem with GitHub. If I want to submit a patch—the thing that Git was made for—I cannot use GitHub to do it. Assuming one has already gone through the "create a GitHub account" step, my closest option is to go to github.com to create a completely unnecessary on-GitHub "fork", go back to my local copy to add that remote and push to it, and then go back to the github.com and click around to submit a pull request.

Pull requests in Git were designed for trusted, frequent collaborators. I.e., project maintainers that are routinely syncing with one another. It's not supposed to be the preferred mechanism for ordinary contributions, and certainly not for drive-by contributions.

My biggest gripe, though, is that the on-GitHub fork from the first paragraph will live on in my namespace forever, unless I manually prune it. And even if I do prune it, I still have no way to control the fact that GitHub has silently set up a social networking timeline to broadcast a centralized index of all this activity to anyone and everyone, without asking me, and without a way to manage the stuff that goes into the timeline, control who it's shared with, or turn it off completely.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#477

I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool , though. Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts). I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool. I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of…

I kind of do have "fun" with GH. I follow people and see what repos they have starred, or code/issues they're working on. I also follow repos and check the source code that's being committed from time to time. Just for fun, to learn new stuff. The "Explore repositories" option did help me to find a couple of interesting repos. I feel that at some point GH decided to distance themselves from the social aspect of the p…

If I'm being honest (and maybe others who are saying they don't care about the "fun" side of GH would agree), I have a knee-jerk slightly negative reaction to this side of Github. And it's because I don't really spend my free time contributing to open source projects. When I was younger I worked on more personal projects, and I coded in my free time just to learn new technologies, but I do this less and less now and am quite happy with that. Probably 90%+ of the code I've written in the past 10 years (some of it quite clever and solving some quite interesting problems, if I do say myself) has been for employers. I don't think that makes me a worse future employee than someone who contributes more to open source, and I feel very fulfilled spending my nights and weekends doing other non-programming things.

I'm glad that others have fun with open source and follow along and contribute to projects. It's amazing and it has benefitted me directly with the libraries I use. But as far as the social pressure of needing to be active on Github, for a while that seemed like it might become an expectation for all programmers. And I'm very glad that it seems to be on the decline now.

Edit: and as far as browsing for new libraries and solutions to use in a project, I guess I haven't ever found Github to be very useful for that. There's no easy way to judge the quality of a library, I have come across a lot of things that oversell themselves in the README and are very buggy and incomplete, as well as a lot of things that are maybe used in a small niche in production and very battle hardened but don't currently have a large active community. For me, Twitter and blogs or other discussion forums have been a much higher signal way to find libraries with the reviews of people actually vouching for them as being solid and broadly useful.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#478
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these problems you've actually had? I have various stuff on GitHub and none of this has remotely happened to me. What you're describing does not jibe with my lived experience of what GitHub is actually like.

You don't really need to experience it to see how this one day might happen to you. Here is a recent example with RuboCop: https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091 "Cop" suddenly became a problematic word and you can read the comments in that issue thread. Imagine you have some repo like "PinkKitty", and then someone blows himself up dressed in pink and pink becomes a symbol of Jihad or White Supremacy or wh…

How likely is it? I don't refuse to swim in the ocean because of the very rare shark attack. You can always point to the most extreme examples of something but if 99.99% of people will never be affected by them, then why make them the primary driver of your decisions?

Also, that link isn't even that bad in the grand scheme of arguments I've been involved in online. It's no proverbial shark attack. You can easily just ignore it and move on with your life.

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