Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you contribute to open source in those days? I did a little (KDE patches to mailing lists before I got Subversion access) and: it was _awful_. You think merging/rebasing/resolving conflicts is a pain now? Doing the same thing via email was _so_ much worse. GitHub has made some parts of open source worse (e.g. how easy it is to now open poor issues while ignoring required information compared to Bugzilla) but the…
One thing I’ve noticed is that the people who “live in their email client” (and this applies to Outlook and to using emacs to read email) are very productive if everything is working right. I’ve seen people blow through a number of patches and discussions in their email client faster than I can even get GitHub to load the notifications. And then there’s a philosophical discussion if burning newbie’s time or discourag…
I still do not miss the days of doing patch management from my email client :)