Things I would build if I worked at GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub

#31

Post by geofft » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 8:37 PM UTC

allendoerfer wrote: post #9

geofft wrote: post #5

It seems like some of these (perhaps all of them other than fixing the "+1" problem) can be done via API clients instead of via GitHub itself implementing it. A third-party website can do wiki searches. A separate service can send you email notifications, and you can turn off built-in emails. Even the +1 thing might be solvable with a bot that edits each bug report to add a clickable +1 badge (a la the CI build-passi…

>This is GitHub after all; why don't we build stuff ourselves instead of waiting for a centralized closed-source company to decide they care about our features? Why would I build something for a centralized closed-source company?

Because then the only thing you're relying on the centralized closed-source company for is actual git hosting. This is a boring problem that dozens of other services solve well, and thousands of other services (like S3) solve poorly in a pinch. If you can migrate the interesting part of GitHub -- issue tracking, PRs, wikis, etc. -- to another provider, and GitHub just holds your data, then you're no longer locked in.

If you don't build it and you wait for the centralized closed-source company to, then you're putting your project even more in their hands.

Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub

#32

Post by beltex » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 8:38 PM UTC

Buetol wrote: post #21

Just see the top requested features: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aop... * Change the target branch of a pull request pull-requests * Delete / remove an issue completely. * Gist comments and mentions don't trigger notifications * Add HTTPS support to Github Pages * Add ability to follow organizations like a user * Insert automatically generated table of contents TOC on rendered markdown fi…

> Add HTTPS support to Github Pages

This is technically already available, though not officially documented anywhere [1]. Example [2]

[1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/156#issuecomment-377...

[2] https://beltex.github.io

Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub

#33

Post by epberry » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 8:39 PM UTC

Wiki search is #1 on my wish list for Github. I see others talking about cloning the wiki repo locally and searching it but for big projects this would be the equivalent of downloading something like the Python docs and searching them. It could be done but it would be a massive pain in the ass.

I have written most of the documentation for the project I contribute to the most and I organized the wiki like a two level tree where a top level page has links to category pages and each page on the wiki is linked to from one of those category pages. Then there are links interspersed among the pages like a normal wiki. This structure works okay but I know it can be better because sometimes I cannot even find information that I produced!

Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub

#34

Post by rocky1138 » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 8:41 PM UTC

Search can be easily worked around by using Google with the site: parameter, e.g., search on Google with this query:

wireless site:https://github.com/esp8266/esp8266-wiki/wiki

Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub

#35

Post by anton_gogolev » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 8:41 PM UTC

jarjoura wrote: post #14

My biggest pet-peeve about GitHub is its issue tracker system. It's great for one-off issues or tracking a pull-request, but beyond that its design is super unwieldy. Such a missed opportunity to crush JIRA, et. al.

What do you miss the most or find cumbersome or unusable?

Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub

#36

Post by anton_gogolev » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 8:42 PM UTC

nickbauman wrote: post #2

Absolutely fix the pull request interface. It currently reads like a ransom note. Go over to bitbucket.org and copy theirs. It's 100x better.

What don't you like in current PRs?

Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub

#37

Post by holic » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 8:42 PM UTC

rocky1138 wrote: post #34

Search can be easily worked around by using Google with the site: parameter, e.g., search on Google with this query: wireless site: https://github.com/esp8266/esp8266-wiki/wiki

Great tip, but unfortunately that doesn't work for private repos.

Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub

#38

Post by wldcordeiro » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 8:42 PM UTC

Nadya wrote: post #13

geofft wrote: post #5

It seems like some of these (perhaps all of them other than fixing the "+1" problem) can be done via API clients instead of via GitHub itself implementing it. A third-party website can do wiki searches. A separate service can send you email notifications, and you can turn off built-in emails. Even the +1 thing might be solvable with a bot that edits each bug report to add a clickable +1 badge (a la the CI build-passi…

The +1 thing is solved by ZenHub - which I'm amazed they've been unable to gather a large amount of traction! https://www.zenhub.io/ Not affiliated, used it, but without others using it it's largely...well.. useless. :) E: Hmm... seems it has become $5/mo to use. I remember it being free. Wonder when that happened? E2: >ZenHub is free for the open source community. Oh.

Chrome only too, which is super lame.

Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub

#39

Post by jpdlla » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 8:43 PM UTC

* Search code in a branch other than master. * Advanced code search inside a repo(match searches with symbols, etc.)

Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub

#40

Post by danielsamuels » Wed, Aug 05, 2015, 8:44 PM UTC

I've gotta say, I strongly disagree with this:

> GitHub already has a great code search

At some point in the last year or so Github rolled out a new search engine which drastically reduced it's usefulness. Any moderately complex search query now has all of the modifiers and key bits stripped out making your search results unnecessarily cluttered and somewhat useless. I consider it to be one of the worst parts of the site these days.