nat's only starred gist says drop ice: https://gist.github.com/nat/starred
lol. didn't he have enough time while he was actually CEO? feels like quite a cop out
Thank you, GitHub
251–260 of 460 posts
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#252I should say that back in the day Nat was one that got me into coding. His nat.org blog (unfortunately cannot find it anymore on archive) was such an authentic piece of writing with his Xamarin and GNOME adventures along with posts and great photography on his general coding life working for OSS and other smallerish companies such as Novell. It was truly inspiration and made me want to live that life - building cool…
I loved reading his blog in the early 00s. Imagine that one day in 2006 I ran "wget --mirror" on nat.org/blog and I still keep the result in my archive folder. I really don't get it why he deleted it.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, github has seemed to be absolutely crushing it lately. With novel features every couple months: Copilot, workspaces, wayyyy better CI.
It was only a couple years ago when it seemed competitors were eating at many of GitHub's fringe uses, and even some (like GitLab) were hacking at the core. GitHub really amped it up and not only brought out useful features from around 2018 on, it also started fixing some (not all) of the most annoying long-term gripes users and maintainers have had. Couple that with adding more abilities to free accounts, and they s…
Seems like they promoted the chief product officer. Seems like exactly the person who delivered this.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#254If person's legacy is a list of all the good things (or bad things) they've done during their time, Nat's legacy as the CEO of GitHub can also be summed into a list. Let me get started...I only remember this one thing but other users of HN can help add more I supposed: - That one time when Nat spoke against DMCA law and said taking down youtube-dl was wrong and he actively pushed for their reinstatement. [1] [1] http…
He integrated Github with Microsoft and didn't screw it up. That is quite an accomplishment honestly.
I think Microsoft was well aware that they had to run GitHub differently. And then they found the right manager idling around.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are technically right, but Nat comes from Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin. He definitely is not a lifelong Microsoft employee.
I don't think that matters in the context of what's being discussed here. If there were any retention contracts that came with GitHub acquisition, that probably didn't apply to him.
You misunderstand why I brought up him being from Xamarin.
The initial conversation was about how Nat was likely leaving because his contract ran out. The counterpoint was that he was from the Microsoft side and therefore he didn't have a retention contract. I brought up Xamarin because he was likely under a retention contract from that acquisition.
That being said, these contracts probably had little to no effect on his decision though, as I'm sure he would have made more money than he could spend in a lifetime regardless of whether he had stayed or not.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
He had to stay on until he was free to leave under the microsoft acquisition contract. 2 years sound about right.
That's not what happened here. Nat founded Xamarin which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Github was acquired in 2018 and Nat was already an Microsoft employee at time. So Nat departing now is actually 5 years post the Xamarin acquisition (when he joined Microsoft). https://www.linkedin.com/in/natfriedman/ EDIT: what's also interesting is that Thomas Dohmke joined Microsoft in 2015, moved to the Github division aro…
Thomas' own blog sounded a bit like he was the special task manager. So do not read too much into this 4 months.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#257Nat was a great CEO. The best that could have happened to Github after the acquisition IMO. The one time that I won't forget about Github under Nat, was when they stood up for Iranian developers [1]. They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran. Many other companies didn't do something similar. [1]: https://github.blog/2021-01-0…
"They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran." Wait, that's a thing ? We get a signup from Iran about once every month and I always, apologetically, send a personal note saying that I wish we could provide service to them but ... You're saying rsync.net can legally provide service to Iranians with ... some paperwork ?
It would take some intensive lobbying:
> And separately, we took our case to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), part of the US Treasury Department, and began a lengthy and intensive process of advocating for broad and open access to GitHub in sanctioned countries. Over the course of two years, we were able to demonstrate how developer use of GitHub advances human progress, international communication, and the enduring US foreign policy of promoting free speech and the free flow of information. We are grateful to OFAC for the engagement which has led to this great result for developers.
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#258Nat was a great CEO. The best that could have happened to Github after the acquisition IMO. The one time that I won't forget about Github under Nat, was when they stood up for Iranian developers [1]. They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran. Many other companies didn't do something similar. [1]: https://github.blog/2021-01-0…
"They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran." Wait, that's a thing ? We get a signup from Iran about once every month and I always, apologetically, send a personal note saying that I wish we could provide service to them but ... You're saying rsync.net can legally provide service to Iranians with ... some paperwork ?
There are standing "general" licenses for any product / company that is doing certain activities and "specific" licenses granted to individual companies. I believe GitHub managed to get a general exemption for anyone providing source code hosting? The general idea is that there are things that the US government wants people in Iran to be able to do as it would help their fight rather than hurt it. This page has the list of general licenses:
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#259Why "cd ~ && mkdir -p nat/next" instead of just "mkdir -p ~/nat/next"?
Maybe he is first going home, than moving on to the next thing?
Re: Thank you, GitHub
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Embrace, extend, extinguish still alive at MS it seems. E: Pointing out proven, explicitly-defined-in-internal-emails tactics used by Microsoft always seems to get downvoted on HN. Why? Would someone like to start a conversation?
What are they extinguishing? Which things do you think they extended? Pointing out stuff from decades ago doesn’t really count as still proven tactics. Though of course all major companies do behave and do things like EEE in different ways.
> What are they extinguishing?
All build tools that MS doesn't control. Their strategy has always been to try lock developers into their ecosystem so that only their ecosystem has all the software people want.
> Which things do you think they extended?
Acquiring and extending both Xamarin and Github. Atom editor is basically dead, MS/Github created an AI tool that presumably uses data they got from Github, they tried to remove features from free .NET tools, etc...
How long until they try to apply some more blatant vendor lock-in techniques with Github, .NET/Mono or maybe Azure?