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GitHub and the crime against software

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Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#81

Post by 48terry »

geekone wrote: post #74
dijit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I upvoted you, for asking the real questions, but to answer) > Where do you keep Issues, Youtrack > Pull Requests, Gerrit, it's way better for code review > Wikis, Also Youtrack, but other software exists that's specific for this, I have seen Confluence used a lot and while I don't recommend: that's usually the case. > Discussions, As far away from code as possible, right now it's Zulip > project boards, Youtrack, t…

would a self-hosted all-in-one solution be a viable alternative that doesn't split these all up into separate cloud hosted apps? it's been years since i've explored anything other than github/gitlab/etc.

Right? Yeah, everything's decoupled and "flexible", but if your stack is dependent on half a dozen different third parties uninterested or uninvested in your project, you gotta watch like a hawk for when those services decide they need to be worse and charge more.

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#82

Post by tonymet »

> The increased ‘agentic’ load on github is the direct result of their own actions and those of their parent company, Microsoft, and that makes reliability problems their own fault.

Microsoft & Github are not a monolith. it's an institution with dozens of divisions and 100k+ employees all vying for revenue.

Anyone who's worked at a big company knows what it's like to be given an unfunded mandate to serve an important business strategy.

The author moans about the 3 copilot button's on github. meanwhile github has to manage (a) providing loads of free hosting and (b) keeping the servers up.

The entitlement to moan about a free app not providing enough free hosting, and bemoan the engineers who are barely keeping it running.

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#83

Post by tonymet »

jph wrote: post #5

Because of so many GitHub problems, I'm adding GitLab.com and Codeberg.org. Setup is simply 3 steps: 1. Sign up on each service, ideally with the same username. 2. For each repo you want to share, create the same repo name as a blank repo; do not automatically create a README. 3. Edit your local file .git/config to add push URLs, then push as usual. Example: [remote "origin"] url = git@github.com:foo/bar.git pushurl…

yes let's fix the lack of capacity by 3x'ing the demand to take down all of these other volunteer services , too

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#84

Post by 48terry »

rurp wrote: post #75
bastardoperator wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this is kind of the perfect use case for AI. I can see the prompt now "using css, make this website readable and use a proper color scheme"

Or... just hit the reader mode browser button that has been standard for years longer than LLMs have existed. I had a coworker talking about how great some AI coding tool is because it can sort a bunch of strings alphabetically for him. This coworker is a programmer. Working with a language that has a builtin sort function.

Plus the dozens of other means of changing a website's styling from the user's side.

Does anything wrap up the AI craze more succinctly than boldly calling AI the perfect use case for an already-solved problem?

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#85

Post by drschwabe »

guessmyname wrote: post #14
jph wrote: post #5

Because of so many GitHub problems, I'm adding GitLab.com and Codeberg.org. Setup is simply 3 steps: 1. Sign up on each service, ideally with the same username. 2. For each repo you want to share, create the same repo name as a blank repo; do not automatically create a README. 3. Edit your local file .git/config to add push URLs, then push as usual. Example: [remote "origin"] url = git@github.com:foo/bar.git pushurl…

Where do you keep Issues, Pull Requests, Wikis, Discussions, project boards, and everything else? (rhetorical question.) These days, the problem with cloud-hosted Git platforms is not where to push your code. Replicating repositories across multiple providers is relatively easy, and Git has always been good at that. The harder problem is that successful teams end up accumulating a lot more than source code around the…

This isn't a direct answer, because I agree it is difficult to move away from Github's familiarities amongst developers - so it doesn't necessarily solve the problem for a collaborative codebase involving a handful or more developers (complete with Issues, PRs, etc) but if you are working with a less technical/developer oriented team ie- regardless of org size it's just you or maybe one other teammate who are the only ones involved directly in code/PRs then you can fairly trivially roll your own issue tracker or wiki.

Particularly if your work and the employer/client/org is primarily based on a web project (extra points, you already are managing their auth) then you could simply add a new subdomain or route to your existing web project that serves said self-hosted issue tracker or wiki.

Of course these things can get into the weeds but I do think that given the dramatically reduced turnaround times for a competent dev to spin up and customize in-house/self-hosted solutions for basic things like issues and wikis the strategy is more relevant and prudent than ever.

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#87

Post by physicles »

guessmyname wrote: post #14
jph wrote: post #5

Because of so many GitHub problems, I'm adding GitLab.com and Codeberg.org. Setup is simply 3 steps: 1. Sign up on each service, ideally with the same username. 2. For each repo you want to share, create the same repo name as a blank repo; do not automatically create a README. 3. Edit your local file .git/config to add push URLs, then push as usual. Example: [remote "origin"] url = git@github.com:foo/bar.git pushurl…

Where do you keep Issues, Pull Requests, Wikis, Discussions, project boards, and everything else? (rhetorical question.) These days, the problem with cloud-hosted Git platforms is not where to push your code. Replicating repositories across multiple providers is relatively easy, and Git has always been good at that. The harder problem is that successful teams end up accumulating a lot more than source code around the…

This is the real issue. We’re currently migrating from GitLab+Jira to GitHub. I did most of the migration, including our CI/CD with a self-hosted runner, and it was… fine.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was that Claude managed cloud agents are awkward to use with anything other than GitHub. In general, we realized that the whole world was on GitHub and we were swimming upstream.

But the original mistake was separating issue tracking and source control when we didn’t need all that power. Everything is so much simpler if you don’t have to maintain those integrations.

Maybe they’ll really enshittify GitHub in the future. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#88

Post by phillipcarter »

Yeah, I didn't really like this post much. I agree the UI is bloated. But there's really two big factors here the post either ignores or doesn't empathize with, which I don't like:

1. The rise of Claude Code is what pushed this behavior, not GitHub and Microsoft's own actions. It is not because they shoved Copilot buttons everywhere, it is because a ton of people worldwide are autonomously pushing commits from Claude Code, and automated PRs/commits kicks off tons of other compute work that highly stresses a system that was never built for this scale.

2. The timeline is extremely compressed. Claude Code did not take off until late last Winter. So in one season they went from being able to mostly handle the volume of activity on their backend to an explosion of activity that shows no signs of slowing down. There is not a team on this planet earth who could foresee this circumstance and reimplement a massive distributed system like GitHub to handle the load gracefully in just a few short months. The writer of this post seems to think very highly of themselves as an engineer and my money is they would also be absolutely crushed by the nature of this challenge.

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#89

Post by nxc18 »

phillipcarter wrote: post #88

Yeah, I didn't really like this post much. I agree the UI is bloated. But there's really two big factors here the post either ignores or doesn't empathize with, which I don't like: 1. The rise of Claude Code is what pushed this behavior, not GitHub and Microsoft's own actions. It is not because they shoved Copilot buttons everywhere, it is because a ton of people worldwide are autonomously pushing commits from Claude…

GitHub enterprise is getting worse release after release. Cloud demand/usage spike is just an excuse.

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#90

Post by physicles »

bix6 wrote: post #10

What happened to hacker culture? Did everyone (or enough) just sell out? It’s fascinating to me that the people who know the most about tech keep deciding over and over to give something to some corporation and inevitably it becomes an issue. I guess ease of use and freemium really trumps everything; I expect more from smart people but money talks.

It’s not about ease of use and freemium, it’s the strong network economies at play, just like credit cards or social networks. It’s impossible for a competing product to get traction if it’s merely a little better than GitHub.
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