Things I would build if I worked at GitHub
1–10 of 145 posts
Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub
#2Absolutely fix the pull request interface. It currently reads like a ransom note. Go over to bitbucket.org and copy theirs. It's 100x better.
Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub
#3I hope all of his post on this blog are like this one (https://kevin.is/committed-to-github/, Kevin is committed to GitHub)
Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub
#4I'd also love for commit messages to be parsed as markdown. I can't really think of a downside to it.
Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub
#5It seems like some of these (perhaps all of them other than fixing the "+1" problem) can be done via API clients instead of via GitHub itself implementing it. A third-party website can do wiki searches. A separate service can send you email notifications, and you can turn off built-in emails.
Even the +1 thing might be solvable with a bot that edits each bug report to add a clickable +1 badge (a la the CI build-passing badges) at the top; all you need is to give the bot ownership of your repository. The badge can display the current +n count, and the service can give you a sorted list of open issues by +n. For bonus points, have the bot also harvest and remove comments that consist of just "+1" or ":+1".
This is GitHub after all; why don't we build stuff ourselves instead of waiting for a centralized closed-source company to decide they care about our features?
Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub
#6+1
I would also implement a button for reverting pull requests already merged in master. Reverting merges may be not trivial for less experienced users
Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub
#7I reported this a while back, so it's in their backlog somewhere but obviously not super-important:
I'd like to see an option to turn off fork notifications for org projects without turning off all org notifications. As-is, I get an email for every dev forking every project, sometimes more than once due to lack of git knowledge.
Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub
#8Personally, I'd like a nice GUI to pick and squash commits with new commit messages against them on creating a pull request. I don't enjoy using the CLI for this, and it would be nice to thread thoughts on the solution into the commits themselves rather than explaining solely in the PR description.
Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub
#9It seems like some of these (perhaps all of them other than fixing the "+1" problem) can be done via API clients instead of via GitHub itself implementing it. A third-party website can do wiki searches. A separate service can send you email notifications, and you can turn off built-in emails. Even the +1 thing might be solvable with a bot that edits each bug report to add a clickable +1 badge (a la the CI build-passi…
>This is GitHub after all; why don't we build stuff ourselves instead of waiting for a centralized closed-source company to decide they care about our features?
Why would I build something for a centralized closed-source company?
Re: Things I would build if I worked at GitHub
#10Those are interesting suggestions, but my guess is that they are probably focusing on features to make github more enterprise friendly. If a16z invests $100 million in github, it doesn't seem like streamlining emails will have the ROI that investors expect.
Maybe github is focusing on creating a full software development lifecycle management (ALM) in the cloud. (Like Microsoft Team Foundation Server and JIRA.) A dashboard for sprints, defect fixes, issues tracking, etc. That's the type of "enterprisey" thing that attracts more business subscriptions. They use the storage of sourcecode repositories to open doors to other sw development related business.
These are just my guesses. I haven't seen any explicit roadmap from github.