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Days without GitHub incidents

dayswithoutgithubincident.com

161–170 of 178 posts

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have. I skimmed your profile. Working on the infrastructure for a couple mid-tier video games is a cool accomplishment, but equating this to having solved GitHub level scale rings hollow. GitHub has a couple orders of magnitude more daily active visitors than the games you worked on had at their peak. You can make valid criticisms of GitHub without trying to reduce their scale or inflate your credentials to creat…

Ok, well, I work on systems quite a bit larger than Github, and I think they have a major reliability issue.

That’s not in dispute. The question is whether we should be supportive of the company’s efforts to improve reliability, or whether we should keep punching down. How would you feel if you were in a similar situation and outsiders breathlessly provided uninformed opinions about your problem and questioned your competence?

It’s all about the Golden Rule.

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#162

I don't think aggregating the whole platform into one number is fair. It's like adding the whole aws into one number

From a user perspective this makes sense. But if you’re MSFT or GitHub this number is pretty embarrassing. They would love if everyone on the platform used all of the features and had massive lock-in right? So if some part of that is always broken, it’s not a confidence booster for users to adopt more of the feature set. Sure the more things you use the more likely it is that one has an issue but clearly stability is…

Why embarrassing? This is normal MSFT

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#163
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By submitting a quality change with a clear description, preferably with unit tests? Is that no longer considered an acceptable hurdle? But the proposal is to specifically disallow that unless the person is already known. That is the model today, the one that people want to get rid of.

I think you are taking an excessive interpretation of what was suggested. Let's level-set on the issue: Of late, GH has suffered a continuous stream of noteworthy outages. It is hypothesized the underlying cause of the instability has been the dramatic rise in submissions from coding agents ("AI"). The open question is how (or whether) GH can get load at a manageable level, with the proposal being, 'don't immediately…

> "don't immediately trigger an expensive build process as soon as someone submits a pull request."

Yes, and I'd add to that "don't immediately trigger an expensive review process". There's no good reason maintainers should have to be on the hook for screening submissions from the entire general public (including all the various OpenClaws or whatever)... It's an absolutely unreasonable thing to ask of anyone. So Github has the opportunity to both protect their own uptime and do a decent thing for the community by solving this problem.

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have all the empathy for people in the world. A corporation is not a person. If your organization cannot handle the load, then you need to adjust your practices. The organization needs to prioritize their paying users. The organization needs to shift people from new features to keeping the lights on. And maybe the organization needs to find another strategy to manage its azure transition.

A corporation is made of people. GitHub cannot exist but for the people who continue to work for it. And they’ve already said, multiple times, that restoring availability is their top priority.

A corporation is made of people, but its ethos is the product of decision-making. If a corporation is consistently, say, unethical, is it because they hire only unethical individuals? Or because unethical people somewhere along the chain of command make unethical decisions?

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#165

Becoming a joke is the one think that could end the GitHub monopoly.

GitHub is not a monopoly. It never has been. You've always been able to self-host or you can use gogs, gitea, gitlab, bitbucket, you get the idea

Good luck with that. GitHub stars is literally a criteria VCs use for funding.

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#166
post #6

Supposedly commits on GitHub are up 14x YoY.

They are getting spammed by AI agents?

I'd say certianly yes. At my company we've set up an experiment: we've forked our monorepo and gave several agents (OpenClaw, Claude code, GH Copilot reviewer, Codex) full R/W access and a Slack channel where we give them tasks and they carry them out. The fork shows 490 commits ahead, 10 commits behind our real repo (we're only a couple people, and use "Squash and merge" on PRs).

They naturally produce bugs at an astonishing rate, and we don't review the code ourselves, but the project is growing faster than their context windows, and I believe we'll drop it soon.

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#167
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

splitting the status page like they do, to the point where it is only a bit of humourous exaggeration to say that they track broken `git push` and `git pull` separately, is a sleight of hand / accounting / SLA-fudging that we should not excuse there is a subset of the site that pretty much everyone uses — git, issues, pull requests, actions — and if any part of that is broken then the site is broken and the status pa…

> splitting the status page like they do, to the point where it is only a bit of humourous exaggeration to say that they track broken `git push` and `git pull` separately, is a sleight of hand / accounting / SLA-fudging that we should not excuse This is a pretty ungenerous take. You could look at it the other way: if I don't use actions then it's useful for me to know that only actions are broken, and I can continue…

you can do both: report a number that shows how often your service as a whole is degraded, with a breakdown for individual components

example (not sponsored, i barely use codex and today's the first time i've ever had to look at this page; i don't know how much they're fudging the individual numbers or not reporting minor incidents):

https://status.openai.com/

most people who use chatgpt don't use all of the components under the "ChatGPT" heading. for codex, i don't use the vscode extension or codex web. etc

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#168
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A corporation is made of people. GitHub cannot exist but for the people who continue to work for it. And they’ve already said, multiple times, that restoring availability is their top priority.

A corporation is made of people, but its ethos is the product of decision-making. If a corporation is consistently, say, unethical, is it because they hire only unethical individuals? Or because unethical people somewhere along the chain of command make unethical decisions?

I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at with this question. It seems to still conflate corporate-level decisions with boots-on-the-ground work.

Are you suggesting that whatever decisions their upper-level management makes that you consider unethical irreversibly and irrevocably taints all the difficult and honorable work that their engineers and operations people are performing?

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#169
post #23
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and it leads to triple 9 availability (80.999%), or better

/ponder .oO( any irrational number has "infinite nines" ) /ponder .oO( i must be one of today's lucky 10000 https://xkcd.com/1053/ )

Can you believe I got downvoted though, for a half decent joke on HN ...

Re: Days without GitHub incidents

#170
post #100

I recently moved all my projects to a self-hosted forgejo instance and have found it quite satisfactory so far. And it's fast! If you're in the market for a github alternative, take a look - there are options.

What about Gitea?

Forgejo is just the one I landed on, but like I said - there are options!
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