Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How GitHub No Longer Works

zachholman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 139 posts

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#91

Post by pnathan »

strumptrumpet wrote: post #60
techpeace wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discussio…

> I've watched stable projects either wither and die

Can you cite this or comment on particular projects? Centralized repo based projects seem to be struggling in comparison to the DCVS based projects.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#92

Post by ben_straub »

mwarkentin wrote: post #87
trumbitta2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get how do you manage to do security-sensitive things in Campfire via Hubot :-/

I've been working on adding configuration management via environment variables at work. We allow setting configs via the command line, but it posts a notification to our devops room in Hipchat showing who made the change, and which config was changed, but not the new value. This means that people can see what is going on, without having full access to the settings which may be sensitive. I suppose you could also set…

I've seen this done by locking the room, too. That way, everyone in the room when you make the change sees everything (and can check your work), but it's not recorded in the transcripts.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#93

Post by d0m »

Funny, couple days ago I was wondering why zach stopped talking about the github internal.. which I found illuminating and highly entertaining, and then, a couple days later, boom an amazing presentation.

If I may add a question: How do you manage to keep a consistent design across all teams considering that there's no manager and that most teams have different designers?

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#94

Post by strumptrumpet »

benihana wrote: post #81
strumptrumpet wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discussio…

>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. And yet, here we are, years after Github optimized being lazy and broke most of the technical and social structure of open source, and we still have hundreds of thousands of usable and awesome open so…

Your core premises are flawed:

1) The internet and the apps built on it still run just fine.

There is very little maintainership and investment in core difficult technology development. Most core projects that make up the foundation of the internet subsist on the oft-dwindling maintainership of what you seem to consider to be a legacy generation of engineers.

Outside of areas where companies hold direct commercial interest, many core technology projects are withering or stagnate. There are an infinite variety of new JavaScript frameworks, however.

2) Hundreds of thousands of usable and awesome open source projects available to use and contribute to

We're reinventing wheels at a prodigious pace, but your comment demonstrates and underlying shift in the opensource mindset that Github has invoked. Whereas open source was previously something to be produced as a stable, reliable entity, and consumed by users, it has instead become an expensive participatory process for all comers, in which stability and reliability and even documentation is discarded in favor of quick fixes and local patches and increased expenses for the entirety of the ecosystem.

3) More people are getting their code out to the world than before Github.

It's the conceit of every generation that they exceed the previous, but this statement (and the implication that this is due to Github's introduction) is simply not true.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#95

Post by aryastark »

Macha wrote: post #86
aliakbarkhan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The only one I recall it being mandatory on is Quora. Most offer Facebook as an alternative. And as a result, I never used Quora.

Spotify was doing it when I tried to join. They apparently changed it later, to not require Facebook. But, you know, first impressions being what they are, I'll never be a subscriber. Trust is hard to recover once lost. Guess Google is going to find that out the hard way.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#96

Post by napoleond »

strumptrumpet wrote: post #94
benihana wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. And yet, here we are, years after Github optimized being lazy and broke most of the technical and social structure of open source, and we still have hundreds of thousands of usable and awesome open so…

Your core premises are flawed: 1) The internet and the apps built on it still run just fine. There is very little maintainership and investment in core difficult technology development. Most core projects that make up the foundation of the internet subsist on the oft-dwindling maintainership of what you seem to consider to be a legacy generation of engineers. Outside of areas where companies hold direct commercial in…

Although I disagree with almost everything you've said in this thread, I appreciate the different perspective and your points are certainly reasonable (ie. have given me something to think about). However, this:

>> 3) More people are getting their code out to the world than before Github.

> It's the conceit of every generation that they exceed the previous, but this statement (and the implication that this is due to Github's introduction) is simply not true.

has me scratching my head. I would have assumed "there are more people writing code now than five years ago" and "Github has enabled/encouraged/caused/what-have-you proportionately more programmers to publish their code" to both be true statements, leading to an obvious conclusion. What do you think I'm missing?

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#97

Post by holman »

d0m wrote: post #93

Funny, couple days ago I was wondering why zach stopped talking about the github internal.. which I found illuminating and highly entertaining, and then, a couple days later, boom an amazing presentation. If I may add a question: How do you manage to keep a consistent design across all teams considering that there's no manager and that most teams have different designers?

We keep a styleguide (which is actually public: https://github.com/styleguide) that we loosely use across many products and apps. Beyond that, we have two libraries (one CSS, one JavaScript) that we pull into projects that help us maintain a general feeling of consistency.

Beyond that, designers get passed around the company a lot. Typically they can implement the frontend quicker than the backend can be finished. This has an interesting and unintended side effect of getting designers working all across the company. I think this plays a large role in getting a lot of the consistent feel across different projects: there's a lot of transfer of taste across the company.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#98

Post by rschmitty »

"Our tech stack shrinks as we age, fewer trendy languages and databases, your product should be cutting edge, not your tech"

I'm glad this was said. I find it hard to quell the excitement about new FOTM language/framework/database in our internal team and always wanting to use the hot new stuff that HN is raving about.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#99

Post by frossie »

WoodenChair wrote: post #67
patcon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Renaissance? Open source has never been less healthy. I stopped reading. We're not operating on the same plane of reality.

Then you missed out on an intelligent and frankly important critique. He managed to put in words what I have been thinking for a while. I was skeptical after the first two sentences too...

The statement made upthread was that (a) github destroyed open source social structure and (b) has resulted in buggy releases when there are releases.

I would have liked to see some examples in such a broad statement. I am struggling to think of an O/S project I used pre-github that fits the bill.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#100

Post by namuol »

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…

You're misunderstanding what "problem" GitHub is trying to solve.

Remember their slogan? "Social Coding." No other platform out there has the userbase, let alone the sheer usability of GitHub.

There's a reason GitHub fanboys exist: it's a service that's delightful to use.

Post reply on HN