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GitHub and the crime against software

eblog.fly.dev

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Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#91

Post by x-yl »

Through the magic of Claude, here is what the two hundred and eleven javascript files that GitHub loads on accessing an empty repo with just .md files (https://github.com/github-samples/.github):

  ┌─────────────────┬───────┬────────────┬────────────┐
  │    Category     │ Files │ Total Size │ Total Time │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Copilot         │    32 │   1,749 KB │   1,141 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ GraphQL / Relay │     4 │   1,629 KB │     190 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Primer Design   │     4 │   1,617 KB │     329 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Highlighting    │     4 │   1,048 KB │     414 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Code View       │    14 │     966 KB │   1,226 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ React Core      │     6 │     692 KB │     446 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ UI Components   │    26 │     674 KB │   1,541 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ SVG             │     2 │     634 KB │      51 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Code Editor     │     9 │     615 KB │     366 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Vendored        │    17 │     608 KB │     986 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Issues          │    13 │     589 KB │     504 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Markdown        │     8 │     321 KB │     198 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Runtime         │    12 │     263 KB │     807 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ HTML Parsing    │     2 │     235 KB │     152 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Navigation      │    11 │     230 KB │     362 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Web Components  │     7 │     229 KB │     540 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Comments        │     4 │     131 KB │     146 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Analytics       │     5 │     103 KB │     348 ms │
  ├─────────────────┼───────┼────────────┼────────────┤
  │ Other           │    32 │     484 KB │    2099 ms │
  └─────────────────┴───────┴────────────┴────────────┘
Times given for a 150 Mbps WiFi connection.

Some personal highlights:

- Syntax Highlighting for every obscure language under the sun. Seems like the language analysis they do the repository does nothing.

- Shipping the editor on pages where there is no editor

- Shipping Copilot prompts. Incredible. { prompt:\"Analyze the test coverage of this codebase. Identify areas with missing or insufficient tests and add comprehensive test cases to improve coverage.\" }

- Just a javascript file with a massive 500K SVG.

- I don't really know anything about GraphQL & Relay. But 1.4 megabytes of generated ASTs?

- Shipping Protobuf, YAML, Lodash (hashing, unicode, collections), Typebox, GSAP and Framer

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#92

Post by efronlicht »

Author here. For those who don't care for the color scheme, my site has - a light theme: https://eblog.fly.dev/githubbad-light.html - a plain theme: https://eblog.fly.dev/githubbad-plain.html, added as part of the same update where I submitted this article. Both of those are available as PDFs as well (replace .html with .pdf).

And of course you can use reader mode in your favorite browser.

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#93

Post by efronlicht »

tonymet wrote: post #82

> 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…

Author here. I am not a free GitHub customer. The only times I use GitHub are when my consulting clients do, who are by and large GitHub enterprise customers. It is not entitlement to complain about a company that you pay money for a service failing to provide that service by the terms of their own service lifetime agreement, something I point out repeatedly.

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#94

Post by lukeschlather »

9999gold wrote: post #76
tobinfekkes wrote: post #72

I use Github extensively for my personal company, but I also use Azure DevOps (and all git-related features) extensively for a client's project. I keep seeing the Github issues being attributed to their move to Azure backend for "scale". But we have no issues whatsoever with Azure Devops....ever. It's excellent. Seriously. Does anyone know why the experience between Github and DevOps is so different, if they're suppo…

I find Azure DevOps UI/UX very janky. Like, the work items sometimes are loaded in the frontend only and sometimes there is a refresh, then the URL in the browser is not the same of the work tree I am seeing; sometimes there is a lot of flicker/redirects to sign in. The wysiwyg editor sometimes preserve the color themes of the person who opened, it seems. The markdown editor is view or edit only. I probably faced mor…

The flicker/signin redirects are a regression introduced post-Github acquisition. Really just evidence of the product being abandoned, or possibly of general operational decline at Microsoft which is affecting all their products. Definitely since the acquisition, both products have declined but Github has declined more to the point where I might prefer Azure DevOps.

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#95

Post by wps »

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.

Fossil does all of this, and has a better VCS for my use case than git does. https://fossil-scm.org

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#98

Post by fragmede »

48terry wrote: post #81
geekone wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like a hawk? If GitHub was down while you slept, would you notice?

Those third parties will be more invested in you as a customer than GitHub is.

Re: GitHub and the crime against software

#100

Post by nullsex »

suobset wrote: post #15
ivanjermakov wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to pay for git hosting. Seems like nobody wants to self-host it either.

Codeberg and Gitlab exist though. The problem is the inertia. Tons of repositories in GitHub from way before MS acquired them, which makes most people use GitHub, which makes most software projects choose GitHub. Heck, GH Stars are used as a vanity metric for a lot of projects.

Codeberg only serves a small subset of what Github does.

Pitching them as a no-brain replacement and advising people to move all their personal repos over is abusive towards Codeberg.

For community-facing FLOSS it is good. For other uses you need to look elsewhere. Forgejo, which is what Codeberg ises, is easy to self-host and other providers exist.

https://sr.ht is more open and has paid options.

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