It does strike me as unfair that GitHub themselves made the exact same mistake but were able to fix it with database backups.
It would strike me even more unfair if GitHub fixed this mistake only for customers they like.
We lost 54k GitHub stars
451–460 of 697 posts
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suggest you read "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'". You'd learn a lot. https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error... My view is that expecting humans to stop making mistakes is much less effective than fixing the systems that amplify those mistakes into large, irreversible impacts.
The penalty for sin is death.
What about cos?
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#453Something which annoys me with GitHub is that I don't have the option of setting up a mailing list which people viewing my repository page can opt into, as easily as they can star or opt-in to notifications. I often want to ask my users things, and I simply have no mechanism of doing that.
(doesn't have to be a mailing list, that's just the simplest feedback-request mechanism I can think of.)
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#454I really like this post. While the author clearly feels bad about the fact that they've lost his community and that GitHub didn't restore it (which is honestly what any of us would've felt under similar circumstances), they're also focusing towards the future and using their personal experience as a parable all of us can learn from. Lesson 1 on UI design I think is really important. I often think scary popup boxes ar…
Github is built with MVC. On rails no less. Where problems like soft delete are hard, or even impossible to solve (in scale). Yet there are many architectures beside MVC. Many of them decades old. Proven. Established. Yet unknown to devs who picked up a rails book on day 1 and never looked back (I've been guilty of that for years). This particular problem is a textbook candidate for Command Pattern. The problem of un…
1. Why would it be particularly difficult for them to have soft deletes in Rails or at scale?
2. Like the article suggests, additional UX improvements could be made besides making it possible to restore a backup or providing an undo action.
3. I feel you are ignoring the fact that technology-wise it was probably Rails along with its MVC model that got them into their scale in the first place.
4. Had they focused on a more exotic architecture from day one, the UX of other features on the site could've been significantly worse.
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't know what else they could have done to try to prevent it. As the author of the post suggests: Prominently spell out "This will remove 54,000 stars." vs. "This won't remove any stars (there are none yet)."
I'm not convinced that would have really solved the problem. One could just as easily post a screenshot of two nearly identical dialogs where the only different is that one says "This will remove 54 stars" and the other says "This will remove 54,000 stars" and the same argument could be made that "the only way to notice the difference is if you happen to notice those 3 zeros."
In practice, they are extremely unlikely to be zeroes.
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#456The real problem is: Why are GitHub stars so important if httpie is so great?
Because people cannot judge for themselves if something is great or not, they always need proxies. It would be cool if we could somehow fix THAT.
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did RTFA. I do not accept the excuse that he didn’t read it properly. He skimmed it because he thought it was the same box but it wasn’t. He even admits that it contained the exact information that he was looking for. I don’t see any way he can complain.
Ok then. I hope others are less judgmental of you than you are of them next you make a mistake in life.
I take ownership over my mistakes. I don’t try to blame others. The world would be a better place if everyone did that.
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just surprised that after going through that pain themselves they didn't decide to revise how that social linking data is handled. A lot of github content is softly deleted by necessity, you couldn't nuke tickets written by a now non-existent user or unmerge PRs so this isn't really a new concept to the team. I don't think it's surprising they'd do such a thing for themselves and not a customer - I'm more surpris…
Or simply automate the restoration! They know how to do it! Make it easy!
True. On the other hand - Atlassian did automate their backup restoration. Look where it brought them ;-)
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#459The real problem is: Why are GitHub stars so important if httpie is so great? Because people cannot judge for themselves if something is great or not, they always need proxies. It would be cool if we could somehow fix THAT.
Any recommendations?
Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars
#460I think people here are underestimating how difficult it is to implement is_deleted in a production system. Literally EVERY query has to be rewritten to reflect the new database schema. If it's not been implemented from the start then you have a considerable re-write, and usually this type of project will not be revenue generating.