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How GitHub No Longer Works

zachholman.com

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Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#121

Post by bluesnowmonkey »

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…

> We're reinventing wheels at a prodigious pace[...]

What you see as waste, I see as valuable experience. In school, did you just read books and take tests? Or did you spend a lot of time solving problems that had already been solved, deriving equations you could have looked up, writing programs you could have downloaded...?

People learn by doing. You don't sit down and design the Next Big Language on your first try. You invent a lot of shitty, unoriginal little languages while simultaneously studying what's out there, and maybe eventually you get to the cutting edge where you can create something novel and better.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#122

Post by enjalot »

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…

Circus? you could barely call it a sideshow. I remember the glory days when we wrote perfect algorithms by hand and mailed them by post to each other. We called it Mathematics.

I've watched beautiful concepts come to life only to choke on the reality of bits.

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

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#123

Post by codezero »

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.

You can join Quora with email only, Gmail auth, or Twitter.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#124

Post by eru »

trustfundbaby wrote: post #33
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…

> 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 Then you can imagine how many people outside of the Bay area do the same thing. I've worked at places where I (stupidly) suggested some of their principles as solutions to systemic problems that came up, assuming that everyone would be on the same page (I mean…

Don't give up so quickly. Sneaking in good ideas into companies is a skill that takes time to learn, and even when mastered takes patiences to exercise.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#125

Post by namuol »

strumptrumpet wrote: post #119
namuol wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when were bureaucratized quality standards part of Open Source? --- "GitHub optimized being lazy" -- translation: GitHub enabled more people to get involved with Open Source. There are no-fewer quality-obsessed developers participating in the community as a result of GitHub. There are, however, a lot more people involved, and a lot more code being "churned". The suggestion that the community is suffering as a r…

> There are no-fewer quality-obsessed developers participating in the community as a result of GitHub. There is natural attrition of participants in any project; what keeps (or kept) so-called "quality obsessed" developers in abundance were the social structures -- and social currency -- of the communities built around open source projects. In exchange for stature, learning, and intangible satisfaction, contributors…

I never disagreed that the overall quality of the code has gone down; I meant to suggest that such an observation misses the point.

Open Source is now much more accessible, and I think that's a good thing.

It used to be that if you wanted to own a car, you needed to basically have the knowledge of a mechanic. Now any "idiot" can own and operate a car. Is that such a bad thing? Cars are for getting you from A to B, remember?

There is arguably more mediocre code out there in the public eye now, thanks to GitHub. Is this bad? I'm not sure. But don't tell me that GitHub has made it more difficult for you to make software of the same quality as the stuff from 20 years ago.

Furthermore, why do I need to "choose" one of the options you gave? I don't care if I'm "junior" or "senior".

TL;DR: I just want to get my work done like everybody else. It's a matter of practicality; not honor.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#126

Post by ak217 »

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...

> an intelligent and frankly important critique

I disagree on both counts. Actually, I find the assertions in that post callous and destructive. This cathedral that the poster is referring to never existed. Open source has never been healthier, and Github is a very big part of the reason why.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#127

Post by dlitz »

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…

> 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.

I've been paying attention to this stuff since around 1998, and except for the animated GIFs, this has always been the case. The difference is that we've had 15 years for the abandoned cruft to accumulate, and Google has gotten a lot better at finding it.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#129

Post by vdaniuk »

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...

Such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the person supplied zero evidence.

Re: How GitHub No Longer Works

#130

Post by derefr »

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…

I think you're both looking at this the wrong way. The projects that "wither or stagnate"? Without Github, they likely wouldn't be publicly-accessible at all. The professionals will always produce professional code, the amateurs will always produce amateur code, and what Github did was to make the amateur code accessible. You can't make the amateur code into professional code, but that by no means translates to it being valueless. You just have to recognize it for what it is.
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