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We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

blog.gitbutler.com

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Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#731

Post by conartist6 »

rurp wrote: post #693
conartist6 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better. I'm not famous though, I'm just a good engineer who is patient, inquisitive, and determined enough to spend the last five years of my life on nothing but this. My question is: say the investor believes that some new platform will win out over Github. How do I make the case that it will be mine over…

Reach out to investors that you or your friends/family have an existing relationship with. If that's not an option your odds of being funded are slim. Consider going to Stanford or networking with them another way; the latter being much easier if you're already wealthy. This might sound like a joke or overly cynical but I'm being totally serious. Merit and product quality are only very loosely correlated with funding…

I appreciate the advice, but I'm a couple steps ahead of you. I spent 10 years mastering my trade (UI) working in San Francisco and Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and that's when I saved enough money to allow myself to work on this for the last 5 years.

And fortunately I don't need anyone's permission. It's just too late to stop the wave of change that's coming now. After 5 decades, the punchcard is finally going to be retired as the primitive at the heart of all programming.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#732

Post by hdgvhicv »

bluGill wrote: post #473
hdgvhicv wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guessing you aren’t working with hundreds of collaborators in a distributed offline system. Which is what git was for and why svn wasn’t enough for that type of use case.

The vast majority of git users are using github as a central repository. There a a few other not github but serves the same purpose central repositories. Distributed sounds cool, but almost everybody wouldn't notice a thing if git was centralized.

Yup, I guess local commits when GitHub is offline (as it is frequently) is a decent improvement on a central subversion server if you are genuinely working offline or your scan server is as faliable as saas tends to be.

I used subversion for 10 years and don’t ever recall a problem when it was offline but the killed feature of GitHub - distributed source control - proved too complex For the majority of development teams. Instead there’s a “main” which people fork, add a feature, then merge and delete the fork.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#733

Post by not_kurt_godel »

conartist6 wrote: post #723
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The specific problem Problem for whom? Users who are happy using git? Or conartist86 who is thinking about how to get money? > the competitors to Github have to use git Why? Syncing between various VCSes has been a thing since forever. If you can't handle a compatibility layer to support git+new-better-thing, you don't have the technical chops to build new-better-thing in the first place.

I do want forwards compatibility, I don't want backwards compatibility. The way I think about it, if I make a backwards compatible product I might end up with users who never really wanted any change at all, and those people would be almost impossible to make happy. Those are the "faster horse" users. What I need is to find the people whose life would be changed by a car!

Why would users who never wanted change proactively switch to your product in the first place? And putting them aside, you haven't listed a single concrete technical idea that would indicate you have the vision for a car. Maybe you should spend more time on that than drumming up your grift-adjacent persecution complex.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#734

Post by znnajdla »

heeton wrote: post #605
Orygin wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's gambling that they can extract money from open source project, by repackaging most of the existing features through a nice UX and hope business gamble their tech stack on it. Great use of 17 million dollars.

I wouldn't say "buying software that saves us time" is gambling, but you do you.

But that’s not what VCs are doing. They’re not buying software that saves time. They’re betting on a teams ability to extract rent from a market through monopolistic practices like vendor lock-in. The most profitable software companies like Microsoft don’t make the most time saving software, in fact most of Microsoft’s offerings are garbage (ahem Teams) compared to alternatives. But Microsoft makes the most money due to marketing and distribution not because they make “time saving” software.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#735

Post by Cpoll »

000ooo000 wrote: post #685
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not solved because it’s trash. There’s no good interface for it and people find it difficult to use.

Skill issue. It's the most popular VCS in the world by a huge margin, millions of devs use it every day just fine, countless forges have been built around it, and there's only one semi-compelling alternative frontend (jj). If you honestly find Git challenging, how are you coping with software engineering? Git is the easy part.

Millions of dev use it in the most rudimentary way, occasionally lose their stash, rm their local repo and start over, ask the office expert for help every time they need to figure out where-the-foxtrot that commit came from, don't even attempt to use reflog or bisect or interactive staging, etc.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#736

Post by Cpoll »

_3u10 wrote: post #655
chipsrafferty wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, you might want to throw that entire repository away and restore it from a backup before the offending commit because it's so difficult to fix and guarantee that it's not hiding in there somewhere and while also not breaking something else. I'm not a git expert but I cant image that's true

It’s not you just need to force push or generate a new key…

Perhaps proving the point here. That's not enough to eliminate the secret, the dangling commit will persist. Though this might be a nitpick, it's rather hard to get it from the remote without knowing the SHA.

> generate a new key

Is absolutely the right answer. If you pushed a key, you should treat it as already compromised and rotate it.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#737

Post by conartist6 »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #733
conartist6 wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do want forwards compatibility, I don't want backwards compatibility. The way I think about it, if I make a backwards compatible product I might end up with users who never really wanted any change at all, and those people would be almost impossible to make happy. Those are the "faster horse" users. What I need is to find the people whose life would be changed by a car!

Why would users who never wanted change proactively switch to your product in the first place? And putting them aside, you haven't listed a single concrete technical idea that would indicate you have the vision for a car. Maybe you should spend more time on that than drumming up your grift-adjacent persecution complex.

They wouldn't. Every adoption curve needs early adopters, who will be people not satisfied with the current state of things. But obviously most people aren't early adopters.

If you would like me to list a single concrete technical idea, I am pleased to oblige. The idea is: universal gaps. Our syntactic-semantic documents can have holes in them, places where we know some content is missing. That allows a document to behave like a template which lets us fill in the blanks. In a text-editor-based IDE there is no equivalent, which means that when I go to make a new sticky regex in Javascript I type //y and the IDE thinks I meant to comment out the rest of the line. It has no way of expressing the concept that between those two slashes something is known to be missing, which is exactly what I want to be able to tell it so that it can understand the difference between the state when I'm about to write a regex body and the state where I'm about to write a comment body

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#738

Post by OJFord »

conartist6 wrote: post #725
OJFord wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying the problem for competitors to Uber is that they still have to take customers between the same A and B.

Maybe, but the way they captured the market was by offering a differentiated product. We already had cabs and buses, yes, but Uber wasn't just summoning cabs and selling bus tickets, where they? The core experience was still A to B but Uber discovered that there was a lot more consumer innovation possible within the confines of the A to B problem...

Yes, exactly? And closer competitors to Uber came later and are I assume successful. Just like there is Gitlab, Bitbucket, sourcehut, and several others all 'within the confines of the hosted git problem'.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#739

Post by conartist6 »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #726
conartist6 wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mystified by this argument, that the best way for me to play the game is how others are playing it. Investors don't all make the same bet, nor do they want to, so I'm going to do what only I can do. Sure some people will rule me out for superficial reasons, but I also get some benefit in screening out people who want to kick the tires but aren't interested in building a real relationship, just like companies do w…

Your analogy is telling. Would you consider your position closer to a company hiring for a job, or a homeless person asking someone for money?

The gist of the Mythical Man Month is that if you don't give time there are some things in engineering that no amount of money can buy.

I may not have any money at the moment, but what I do have cannot be bought.

Re: We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git

#740

Post by conartist6 »

OJFord wrote: post #738
conartist6 wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but the way they captured the market was by offering a differentiated product. We already had cabs and buses, yes, but Uber wasn't just summoning cabs and selling bus tickets, where they? The core experience was still A to B but Uber discovered that there was a lot more consumer innovation possible within the confines of the A to B problem...

Yes, exactly? And closer competitors to Uber came later and are I assume successful. Just like there is Gitlab, Bitbucket, sourcehut, and several others all 'within the confines of the hosted git problem'.

There were players for hosted SVN too before git and Github came along. Github got big in part because they weren't in the same crowded market. That others eventually emerged to play in the market with them did little to hurt the return on their initial investment...
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