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GitHub isn't fun anymore

jaredpalmer.com

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Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#461

Post by julianeon »

lqet wrote: post #288
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #100

I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool , though. Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts). I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool. I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of…

Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old. For adults, there lies incredible satisfaction in mastering any but the most exploitative professions or jobs and fulfilling them dutifully, even if they are be no means "fun".

I guess I would come from the opposite direction and say: If you can make something important and useful - but generally seen as boring - “fun” there are big wins all around.

The jobs in one corner vs. fun in another usually creates a system where everything that’s fun is unfortunately useless, from a professional perspective.

And some people like that! They want to work for 8 hours and make memes/play games the rest of the time. They don’t miss the “lost” time at all.

But some of us really want to convert that useless time into something useful. You can hate us if you want, but I don’t think we are necessarily wrong to want this.

Example: I just don’t have enough time. I’m noticing now that when I take even 30 minutes off, in terms of my productivity- it hurts. I’ve personally concluded that the concept of “free time” just doesn’t apply to me, and I don’t really have any.

Another example: at a certain level, given the right approach, probably anything can be fun. Physics can be fun! Linear algebra can be fun! But you know as well as I do that when people talk about fun colloquially, they never mean linear algebra. So pushing back on what is “fun” exactly can have big on the job benefits.

In this context, switching 30 minutes over from “mindless entertainment” to “somewhat professionally useful entertainment” is a massive win. Enough to get me to stop doing one thing and do something else, actually.

I would guess a lot of people on Twitter would be in the same boat, based on how they use it.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#462

Post by kps »

floatingatoll wrote: post #61

GitHub's time as the "cool" option has ended. It has matured and moved beyond the early adopter community, and presence on it is no longer a social signal of any significant relevance. I use GitHub to get work done, either on my projects or on others. I do not expect GitHub to innately provide me a degree of fun. That's the job of the projects, not of GitHub itself. Zoom exited the early adopter phase this past pande…

Hopefully something not using git. Changeset workflow glued onto snapshot storage is just fundamentally broken.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#463

Post by patates »

maccard wrote: post #426
patates wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was more like a community and they destroyed it. Less than 1% of new repos were mercurial (what a surprise with zero mentions of mercurial anywhere except small text and zero marketing and they didn't even have it in their self-hosted product), sure, but existing repos were the problem. Some abandoned ones are lost forever. At least archive them, offer a tar download, anything... People had to parse the issues, pe…

> I think after a year they could put everything in archive mode, but no, they deleted it with no easy export. I mean, it's still there. If it's that much of an issue, and the tooling has been made by the community, you're free to archive it now. At what point is it ok for them to say "hey, we don't want to pay to store the data/keep the codepaths to display/interact with this data" anymore? How many of those people…

> At what point is it ok for them to say "hey, we don't want to pay to store the data/keep the codepaths to display/interact with this data" anymore?

At the point when they make it super easy for the people to archive the data themselves. Code part is easy, PRs, issues and downloads are hard. See: Google takeout

> I hope as a paying customer, you cancelled your subscription to them and told them explicitly why then.

Not just even for me, I made my company switch to it, and we were also hoping support for mercurial in the future, but were okay with it not supporting mercurial in local deployments, we had our hg repos on bitbucket.org. When the news broke, I moved to GitHub and perkeep (for archiving all the JSON data that I painstakingly had to scrape), and my (now former) company found a smaller vendor that offered what BitBucket was supposed to offer but never delivered, only for 100x the price (although one-time, custom development for them).

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#464

Post by untog »

nikanj wrote: post #44
root_axis wrote: post #18

Hard pass on the suggestion to add more social network features. Such features are only conducive to drama and anxiety, we need less of that not more.

Social network features are such a 2015 me-too fad feature anyway. What they should add is AI, or maybe blockchain.

> What they should add is AI, or maybe blockchain.

So they should add 2018 me-too fad features?

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#465

Post by Carpetsmoker »

arghwhat wrote: post #324
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think it's strange for a service provider to tell people that "mercurial isn't suitable for this" (even though it clearly works, and has been working for many years) and "you're writing your program wrong"? It's fine to not support certain use cases because it's too much effort or otherwise too expensive. It's not fine to, as a service provider, tell people that their programs are (and I quote) "wrong". If…

No, because mercurial really isn't suitable for this . Nor is Git for that matter. Similar thing happened on Github with CocoaPods: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652 .

It works, so it's suitable.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#466

Post by xxs »

gilbetron wrote: post #400
xxs wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

next would be the red-black trees or some utter nonsense.

Literally read a post about some terminology that used red/green in them, and how that was biased against the colorblind. Not that some interface used the colors red/green, but merely the terminology used the words. As a red/green colorblind person ... words fail me at the stupidity of that.

red/green is commonly attributed to testing - usually the interface has red and green, though. I just dont get how people get offended over such stuff, like err... "Mains in computer engineering"

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#467

Post by soraminazuki »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #420
bluntfang wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not consider Japanese to be Western? I mean, America literally rebuilt the moral, ethical, and political environment after dropping the bomb.

Japanese culture is quite different from American culture. We did rebuild them, and McArthur is revered as a god, over there. But they really have their own culture, and some aspects can strike us as quite strange (as, I am sure, some aspects of our culture weird them out). I worked for a Japanese company, and went there, multiple times a year, for about twenty years (all Tokyo, so I can't speak for the rest of Japan…

> McArthur is revered as a god, over there

While he's undeniably a famous historical figure in Japan, my impression is that the majority of Japanese people don't have any strong opinions about him. After all, how many people actually care so much about historical figures when they're busy watching cat videos on YouTube? But for the people who do have some interest, I assume many have mixed feelings on the matter, which is natural for citizens of a former military dictatorship turned democracy only because they lost the world war. The rest are far-right people who, as you can imagine, hate him with a passion, though I do hope they're only a minority of Japanese people whose voices are amplified by Twitter echo chambers.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#469

Post by decebalus1 »

lqet wrote: post #288
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #100

I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool , though. Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts). I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool. I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of…

Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old. For adults, there lies incredible satisfaction in mastering any but the most exploitative professions or jobs and fulfilling them dutifully, even if they are be no means "fun".

My guess is that it started as a differentiator in the market. This is 'fun', other things are not. Then it leaked into other places, such as the workplace which became increasingly infantilized at ultimately the detriment of the worker (benefits include: shitty health insurance, ping pong tables and foosball leagues!!). This further led to the internalization of natural negative or neutral feelings: you feel down? What's wrong with you? Everyone else is having fun! This is fun! Your job is fun! You must be broken, therefore you need to fix yourself.
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