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How GitHub No Longer Works

zachholman.com

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Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#51

Post by jmathai »

yapcguy wrote: post #41
eknkc wrote: post #11

I love almost eveything GitHub does, and the way they do them. I'm a GitHub fanboy. There it is. I had a similar crush on Google, maybe 6-7 years ago, they lost me somewhere on the road.

What's the big deal about Github? Too much hype. Whenever you hear about the number of repos, most of them are just forks. In fact, I've created many by accident because Github changed their UI so clicking the icon instantly starts a fork instead of asking for confirmation first. I guess it's good for bumping the numbers up when getting private equity investors interested (cynical, I know). Security wise, meh. Why wo…

> A good business and a slick offering but it's not going to suddenly transform your software projects or your abilities as a programmer.

I'd wager a pretty penny that Github has exposed a few orders of magnitude more people to the actual source of open source software than its predecessor, SourceForge.

Edit: grammar

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#52

Post by mpyne »

canistr wrote: post #43

I'm always skeptical when companies say they have "no managers" and are a completely flat organization with 100+ employees. I don't pretend to fully understand organizational theory, but I take it that at some point, there will be someone doing the "management" work. Whether that's someone with the title of ninja/hacker/product guy/project manager/director/CEO/BDFL

If nothing else Dunbar's number will creep in somewhere. And of course the whole reason we don't use flat hierarchies unless the company is really small is because of the explosive growth in the company communications graph.

People could form ad hoc teams to reduce the exponential growth (instead of having such teams pushed on them by management), but then it's not a flat hierarchy anymore. Instead it's a self-organizing construct which may or may not be better than actually designing a proper org. structure.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#53

Post by bct »

canistr wrote: post #43

I'm always skeptical when companies say they have "no managers" and are a completely flat organization with 100+ employees. I don't pretend to fully understand organizational theory, but I take it that at some point, there will be someone doing the "management" work. Whether that's someone with the title of ninja/hacker/product guy/project manager/director/CEO/BDFL

Somebody needs to do the management work, but they don't need to be "higher" in the org chart than the people they're working with.

The best managers I've had are more like facilitators than bosses.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#54

Post by ldng »

RandallBrown wrote: post #32
eknkc wrote: post #11

I love almost eveything GitHub does, and the way they do them. I'm a GitHub fanboy. There it is. I had a similar crush on Google, maybe 6-7 years ago, they lost me somewhere on the road.

Back in college around '08 my friend and I always used to joke that Google would buy a startup or company, then make their product free and better. That doesn't seem to happen much anymore.

Nop, it does not. They're walling their garden. Many thanks Mr Job.

Youtube comment only available if you're logged in for instance.

Actually, nothing that new here. They wanted to build the Google distributed "computer" since early on. Except some of us thought it would be open like the PC. It's now all closed like a Mac

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#55

Post by dasil003 »

carbon8 wrote: post #7

I've found it interesting how many people in the Bay Area, particularly veterans of the 90s boom, discount a lot of the ideas pushed by GitHub and 37signals. Anedotally, one of the common responses whenever I reference either company is, "Yeah, but how big is [GitHub|37signals], really?" It's actually somewhat surprising to me how consistently I've encountered this response (so consistent, it feels as if it was distr…

What really sets GitHub and to a lesser extent 37signals apart is that they are making a product for themselves. That's how they manage to only hire doers. They don't need marketing or usability testing or operations or acquisitions beyond what the doers provide because the feedback loop to the target market is near direct. That's not to say it's easy to do what they've done, but rather it's much less likely those principles could be held as the staple of companies in other markets where engineers and designers will not be as naturally adept at nailing product/market fit by themselves.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#57

Post by Anderkent »

aliakbarkhan wrote: post #49
TylerE wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And G+ is worse because the thing with Facebook...I'm never FORCED to reveal my Facebook identity on the open web. G+ doesn't really give me that option.

You've clearly never been to one of the many sites that insists you log in through Facebook.

But that's fine. I don't care if there's a multitude of services that I never use anyway, and they require facebook login.

I care when services that I do use, purely by virtue of being bought/owned by google, are claimed by a social site I don't use.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#58

Post by techpeace »

yapcguy wrote: post #41
eknkc wrote: post #11

I love almost eveything GitHub does, and the way they do them. I'm a GitHub fanboy. There it is. I had a similar crush on Google, maybe 6-7 years ago, they lost me somewhere on the road.

What's the big deal about Github? Too much hype. Whenever you hear about the number of repos, most of them are just forks. In fact, I've created many by accident because Github changed their UI so clicking the icon instantly starts a fork instead of asking for confirmation first. I guess it's good for bumping the numbers up when getting private equity investors interested (cynical, I know). Security wise, meh. Why wo…

The big deal about GitHub is that they were in large part responsible for the current Open Source Renaissance we currently find ourselves in. Do you remember the world before? Where you would hunt for someone's private SVN repo on their personal site and email them patches, only to hope that something comes of your effort? Compare that with the world of today, where, if I'm using GitHub, I can submit a fix to a project I happen upon entirely from my web browser, if I wish. The maintainer is notified immediately, we can have a line-by-line discussion about the change, and then it can be merged - also entirely from the browser, if that's what you're into.

Introducing DVCS and the pull request model to the wider development world is the reason that the pace of OS software development has accelerated so much in the past half decade. Of course, GitHub did not invent git, but they made it easy to host your repositories, and once Rails migrated to GitHub, the rest of the Ruby world came with it - followed shortly thereafter by a sizable chunk of the wider web development community. If you use one of their many competitors, that's fine - but they wouldn't exist had it not been for GitHub. Remember that Bitbucket started out as a GitHub clone for Mercurial. Gitlab is unashamedly an OS clone of GitHub.

> More holes than a sieve with their Rails setup.

This is just unnecessary FUD. The GitHub and Rails teams have both been fast to deal with security issues as they are raised. Just because a security issue is well publicized, it does not mean that every other piece of software ever written does not have its own security issues.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#59

Post by pron »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #21
reustle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they lost a lot of us as soon as the G+ train started rolling.

The question is, do we matter anymore?

Of course we matter. After all, Google profits from trafficking our private lives. It's a company that manufactures sugar coated surveillance devices that seem so useful that we submit to them willingly. If we didn't matter, Google will have had nothing. After all, its power stems from our voluntary submission to its merciless watching eye.

In fact, the question is frightening. Are we, prisoners, afraid that our benevolent jailers no longer pay us enough attention? That they've lost their touch to slyly subdue us by painting the convincing illusion that they have our best interests in mind? Have the abusive guardians' charms lost their potency on their admiring wards?

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#60

Post by strumptrumpet »

techpeace wrote: post #58
yapcguy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the big deal about Github? Too much hype. Whenever you hear about the number of repos, most of them are just forks. In fact, I've created many by accident because Github changed their UI so clicking the icon instantly starts a fork instead of asking for confirmation first. I guess it's good for bumping the numbers up when getting private equity investors interested (cynical, I know). Security wise, meh. Why wo…

The big deal about GitHub is that they were in large part responsible for the current Open Source Renaissance we currently find ourselves in. Do you remember the world before? Where you would hunt for someone's private SVN repo on their personal site and email them patches, only to hope that something comes of your effort? Compare that with the world of today, where, if I'm using GitHub, I can submit a fix to a proje…

Renaissance? Open source has never been less healthy. All the previous social constructs around properly documenting, testing, and releasing stable versions of your code have been swept away.

Instead we're faced with the constant churn of semi-functional code, users working in silos and then showing up with patches well after it's too late to give them direction, animated GIFs instead of careful engineering discussion.

Github optimized being lazy, and this was appealing, and in doing so they broke most of the technical and social structure that held together open source's ability to produce reliable, stable, well-documented software.

I've watched stable projects either wither and die or become commercialized, and now instead we live in a world of rolling mostly-broken hacked out releases (if there are releases at all), a confusion of forks (which one is the 'real' one?), while animated GIFs and "oh snap" responses permeate our bug trackers.

This isn't a renaissance, it's a circus.

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