GitHub isn't fun anymore
jaredpalmer.com
jaredpalmer.com
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 touch” I must be, because I have never considered it to be a social venue or competitive arena.
It’s just a place I keep my code. I’m quite grateful for it.
I am almost exclusively a Principal author of my work; with dozens of repos, and six figures of LoC (probably seven figures, if we include the code not available in public repos). I think I may have one forked repo; an embedded Web server library that I needed to tweak a bit to make work for my ffmpeg wrapper project.
This is not necessarily a good thing. By authoring my own code, I limit my scope. People who rely heavily on dependencies can have awesome results.
But they need to be very careful about the provenance and quality of these dependencies.
Dependency discovery is an important part of the vetting process. If we have choices, we don’t need to settle for second-best.
Also, I know that, for many folks, learning is a driver for repo discovery.
A lot of forks can indicate an inquisitive and open-minded approach to software development.
I do support it; but it is not how I work.
The projects can have interesting code to read or just show off a cool idea or a different way of implementing something than I'm used to.
Disclaimer: Just a happy sourcegraph user.
[1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_11#_text-search-imp...
But that's just it. It's a bit of limelight. I'm thankful for the interest I've received, but that's all it is, really; it's validation from fellow programmers. It furthers your career in one or two aspects, just like Instagram fuels your self image, or prospects of influencing. But like Instagram, one can chase the limelight their whole life. Ego stroking is addictive. I urge those who come into a bit of limelight to enjoy it, but to stay humble and focus on delivering what you set out to do, not to bask in your temporory moment of glory.
I also interact mostly via desktop tools.
But I have been writing open-source code for twenty years. An open repo site is quite useful for that workflow.
I feel that at some point GH decided to distance themselves from the social aspect of the platform, but I still cling to it.
There are two sides to github consumption - active and passive.
On passive side - we are happy to stick to basics of git on CLI / IDE and get the job done of a version control. And the site is usually to configure CI/CD and so on.
However on active consumption of open source - it is all about discovery of repos relevant to tech you are into and people behind them. It is so amazing to go and find a good committer profile and see what repos he follows.
And the new github trending is simply axing their own feet here.
1. A git-aware Google Drive, where I could stick version-controlled code I wanted to sync between computers and possibly share with colleagues (and also create a paper trail if someone beats me to the bunch publishing something, ha)
2. As a CDN serving open-source projects I depended on, but discovered almost exclusively by other means
None of my GitHub-hosted code ever had a README.md, I never starred anything, and I often never even visited the repos I depended on (their documentation would be hosted elsewhere and copying-and-pasting the GH URL from there was all I needed to do to depend on it). If I visited an Issues page, it was because I got there through googling an error message, not because I went there through GH's UI.
This Drive / CDN usage pattern is sort of the baseline, "passive" level of engagement with GH imo.
I'm glad that others have fun with open source and follow along and contribute to projects. It's amazing and it has benefitted me directly with the libraries I use. But as far as the social pressure of needing to be active on Github, for a while that seemed like it might become an expectation for all programmers. And I'm very glad that it seems to be on the decline now.
Edit: and as far as browsing for new libraries and solutions to use in a project, I guess I haven't ever found Github to be very useful for that. There's no easy way to judge the quality of a library, I have come across a lot of things that oversell themselves in the README and are very buggy and incomplete, as well as a lot of things that are maybe used in a small niche in production and very battle hardened but don't currently have a large active community. For me, Twitter and blogs or other discussion forums have been a much higher signal way to find libraries with the reviews of people actually vouching for them as being solid and broadly useful.
But then again you most likely refuse to dress up for it, amiright?
And you'll throw every prevarication in the book at me as to why dressing up for work isn't necessary.
And I'll tell you that's employee mentality talking.
And you'll say but I'm an engineer.
And I'll say dressing up is fun, for children and adults alike
And you'll say fun has no place at a job.
And try as you might despite all of your engineer's training you won't be able to see there are more than three ways to frame any context.
CydeWays, I like you don't get me wrong.
We go about claiming that we're not saving lives and then we invest our entire existence on this earth towards things that aren't fun? We're going further than not saving lives bro, we're wasting lives.
By now you still haven't noticed that casual culture is a poor substitute for no fun and you're stuck treating your job like a job, so what exactly is the upside?
You're doing the thing you love most in all the world, surrounded by people who feel the same way.
You've gotten every perk known to man from ping pong to free booze.
You're getting paid handsomely, more than any other humans on the planet.
You've created a buffer zone between yourself and the client that could withstand a rocket blast from a scud missile
And you are allowed to wear whatever adolescent threads you choose up to and including socks, sandals cargo shorts and a spiderman T shirt ..
Yet you're not having fun and you still call it a job?
CydeWays honestly what more could anyone wish for? Isn't it enough that you've bucked every professional convention? Aren't you satisfied with the greatest free lunch in the history of human enterprise?
Could it be that all these enticements are what's actually robbing you of the fun you so certainly deserve?
Who knows maybe I've read one too many Aesop's fables.
> You're doing the thing you love most in all the world, surrounded by people who feel the same way.
The thing I love most is understanding ideas and solving cool problems. Would have stayed in academia if the jobs,job security and money were there. There is plenty of problem solving but it's not an everyday occurrence.
> You've gotten every perk known to man from ping pong to free booze.
Might get some free booze at company events. We have ping pong at our yearly BBQ.
> You're getting paid handsomely, more than any other humans on the planet.
Definitely not true.
> You've created a buffer zone between yourself and the client that could withstand a rocket blast from a scud missile
I'm emailing or on the phone with clients on a weekly basis.
> And you are allowed to wear whatever adolescent threads you choose up to and including socks, sandals cargo shorts and a spiderman T shirt ..
This one's true.
by the way, the trending page is not everything about github!
i keep discovering and bookmarking github projects every now and then. for example, this repository where the author has implementations for trigonometry functions in k&r c: https://github.com/richgel999/triglib
i don't believe github has lost its quality either!
they recently pushed that new layout preview that made the app usable when my zoom level is at 150%. i was very happy about that. i can't wait for github to provide a better search engine. and i have the feeling that they are totally working on it :)
I agree that a lot of the recent changes to GH have been really cool. This article sort of makes me wish that features like the trending page were more configurable.
Any karma system (in this case GitHub stars) can be gamed, exploited, and used to generate hype.
I would be very glad if GitHub started moving away from that (although I have no clue what would replace it, if anything at all).
I've looked at some tools used by Google - mailing lists, Gerrit, etc - none of those look fun. For a casual like me, fun is important.
I don't do much with open source because I don't have the headspace, willpower or persistence to contribute much so the discussion is a bit wasted on me, but I've used both Github, Gitlab and Stash (Atlassian) for work projects; the feedback loop that tools like this give is super important to me.
I never once thought "Sourceforge is boring". I thought they became villains.
I feel like it was more like: their offerings were no longer unique, the original team probably moved on, they couldn't make money, and they turned to desperation.
That is to say, (again, roughly) - "modern, stable, (primarily) capitalist, democracies aligned with Western Europe/USA".
So, in the context of geopolitics and political ideologies many people still consider it to include Japan and South Korea. Yours truly included.
Not that I care as much about the "aligned with" part anymore, but certainly the "modern, stable, democracy" part.
Unfortunately “western” is now seen as the Abrahamic judeo-Christian capitalistic worldview, even though the west sprang out of pagan Greece and Rome.
The west "sprang out of pagan Greece and Rome" when they decided to become Christian. The actual pagans had been slowly abandoning paganism as a dead-end and turning more into esoteric religions and neo-planonism etc and the influence of Egyptian etc religions for several centuries before Christianism was a thing...
Other than not having the Christian religion, no, not really.
>Both cultures that honor seasonal cycles, animals, nature, ancestors, animism etc
"Both cultures" ? What cultures ? Neither pre-Colombian Americas nor Europe shared a culture on their respective side. Even if most of Europe shared a common Indo-European root, religious practices were varying widely. Be it from the cross-pollination with different tradition (pre-Indo-European, Semitic and whatnot) or social changes. It's very hard to argue the official Roman religion as practiced in cities was any more "closer to nature" than Catholicism is.
>the Abrahamic judeo-Christian capitalistic worldview
Any more grand words to force into that sentence ?
Making the Christian religion itself being the deciding factor in your reading of history is a position that's very... Christian.
It's my personal opinion that when we see such a discongreguity that we should perhaps choose other words.
Not really. Then we'd be changing terms established for centuries, that most people understand in their two contexts (geographical and cultural), with some new words we'd have to explain every time we use them -- so making things worse.
I wouldn't know if you mean "European culture" in the sense of something unique continental European (the way Europeans have unique cultural traits different from US traits, e.g. analytical vs continental philosophy), or the shared western culture Europeans and US Americans, and Australians, etc have?
Not really, only with extra context/explanation.
It's common to divide US/European culture (even though both western), or to include Japan in the western culture (even though not in the west, and their culture is not European of origin -- west in that sense is more like "westernized").
What you're suggesting is basically using the etymological fallacy as a basis for changing words. Because of linguistic drift, a majority of words would have up be changed at some point - words like "nice" which came to mean their opposite, for example.
Choice of words is an individalized thing and language allows us to be as flexible as we like within still getting the point across. If I choose to say "European" instead of "western" when contrasting with indigenous Americans that sounds fine to me. If you don't make that same choice that's fine too. We'll all be understood.
It also has a political/cultural meaning, which has some roots in geography, but is otherwise totally different.
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). I think that there are a number of Japanese and US/EU expats that live in Japan, on this board.
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.
Why? There's a reason Dugout Doug was fired during the Korean War. Guy was a menace.
I had several people point out his office on the top floor of a building facing the Emperor's Palace (some of the priciest real estate on Earth), in hushed, reverential tones.
I know that means I should leave the Internet, but I am right, usually because I am wrong, and learn differently.
None of us is “born right,” despite some people’s posturing.
Thanks for that.
When they talk to Americans, maybe.
(Obviously in actual critical work, the word western isn’t useful at all as it doesn’t have much meaning)
(II) I'm not a progressive politically, but Western Society has generally improved. Bigger McDonalds meals that make you fatter is "improved" too under the logic of the market. Because developers are relatively scarce, a greater share of this improvement goes to what they want (whereas in burger flipping, the share gone to better golf clubs for execs is comparatively larger).
(III) There's something about law enforcement that attracts a certain kind of personality. I was never drawn to LEO (as a cop, bail bondsman, mall security, anything) because I don't have these personality traits. The same goes for computer programmers. There's certainly a childish trait going on that isn't present in Mad Men's Don Draper (but then, who knows if this guy existed); the web itself gravitates to a light, rounded, primary-colors visual language. I think in part there's a whiz-kid dynamic where many of us were much much more capable than adults in a moment of extraordinary technology shift (the introduction of the internet), whereas in previous generations adults knew better and youngsters wanted to emulate them. ("Never trust anyone over 30" has been around for a long time, but it was an angry sentiment, whereas now 40-year-olds are welcome to emulate whiz-kids if they still have it).
Among other things, these emotions are addictive and are tracked indirectly via engagement metrics.
Maybe I'm just a little too old, but I've always rolled my eyes at those kinds of features and then ignored them. I find it impossible to imagine anyone actually caring about their badges or XP score on some company intranet wiki.
Plus many professional tools need to make use of every square centimetre on the display, and putting this "fun" cruft in it is going to detract from the usefulness of the tool because it now can't accommodate all the necessary UI elements.
There’s a certain kind of manager that loves anything they can measure, however silly it is.
"Fun" is a very poor imitation of "zen" or "peace" (the Christian concept) or "enlightenment" (the Buddhist concept), but has become sort of the sine qua non of secular Western democratic capitalist societies.
Depends what you mean by "western society". A good chunk of Europeans I knew (including in Eastern Europe where I live) share the same mindset as your parent poster: a version control is just a tool and it is gauged on the basis of how much it helps you in your work. Absolutely zero fun factor required. We just want it to be useful and not get in the way (which, admittedly, Git itself isn't quite good at).
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.
A couple years ago I dubbed this trend "Flanders Computing" [1]. I haven't really given much thought about its origins, but it's probably got to do with the increasing demand for happiness that we Americans hold dear.
Collectively I think it's entered the American psyche that the answer to happiness is to avoid anything that makes us anxious or uncomfortable, which results in that toddler-level approach in many things. i.e. Ban things labeled "toxic", ban the boo-boos, keep everyone safe with happy feelings in this space only. But admittedly my thoughts are incomplete.
"The problem is not that we want to be happy; it is that we want to be happier." Not my own observation. But I like it.
If that's a general principle, it implies that happiness can only be felt as an improvement over the past. That would also explain why sadness is necessary for us to be able to feel happiness, and why we're attracted to tragic art. Someone who is the same level of happy all the time will become numb to it, but constantly becoming happier is unsustainable in the same way as a drug addiction.
"The desire for more positive experience is in itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience."
from "The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck" by Mark Mason
The Enchiridion of Epictetus is a good place to start. You'll also learn how to feel when your favorite mug drops, or when a friend pokes your eye in a wrestling match - spoiler: the answer is not giving it a fuck (for lack of a better term).
Yes. For examples of this trend, look no further than American college campuses, especially in the liberal arts.
"Microagressions", "safe spaces", ... it does sound like a lot of people feel untenably fragile when entering the marketplace of ideas.
I think your thoughts are incomplete. What they are missing is the knowledge of and empathy for people who are actually harmed by these behaviors.
Don't worry, most people asking for such bans don't have any real empathy for people who are actually harmed by these behaviors either.
And inversely, most people who are actually harmed, don't care for such bans, they prefer substantive and inherent (felt and voluntary) changes, not bans.
Let's not pretend there aren't plenty of cynics that employ woke culture to sinister ends.
If nobody does it, it would be fine. If everybody does it, then we're worse off than before. But if some do it, and others don't, then the ones who do it win big.
I think people would be happier if they did think in terms of a six year old. There is nothing inherently "professional" about using drab and dull interfaces for coding and going to an office where you all dress in identical suits.
There is quiet satisfaction in achieving mastery like you mention, but (IMO) it should be accompanied by a pleasant feeling too. GitHub's cheerful, bright colors and interface enable that for me, and I'm grateful to them for it. GitLab and Bitbucket feel flat, dreary, and dull by comparison, honestly. It's like going to a brightly colored room with nice sofas v/s an all-grey room with a white desk. Which one are you going to be more productive in?
I think this is also why Slack is incredibly successful for something that is basically an IRC-in-browser implementation. It made work "fun" for a lot of people and thus steam-rollered opposers.
It's as if we're letting the jaded cynics of the world win.
Yes, it is childlike, but there is no shame in that-- if anything, history is proving more and more that the generations who maintained that everything must be as repetitive and miserable as possible had no idea what they were talking about-- and are now dying with active diagnoses of dementia and Alzheimer's.
Yeah, seeing the headline of this article made me think of how I've never heard a carpenter exclaim what fun it is to use a cordless drill.
Strange analogy. Many people go into carpentry because they like working with power tools. It's fun.
Programming is the same. Many of us were drawn to it because we like it. It's fun.
If you go through life doing a job that you don't enjoy a tiny bit, you're going to be miserable. Why not have some fun?
GitHub is a well-designed tool for multiple use cases. One aspect was the 'Social Programming' as they were marketing it back then. Trending, stars, fork counts were feeding into that aspect. Even the Issue tracker is a kinda social feature.
I find GitHub as a tool is still a fun/joy/handy to use...if only they fixed the odd bug in mobile view that requires me to refresh several times before it loads the styling files.
It's clear that Github has changed the trending section to push api's of the big players.
Git is a tool, yes. But GitHub is “social coding”, which should at least be a little fun.
Umm...yes. Yes, I did. Be nice.
I understood what the author was saying. I never wrote that I disagreed with it; just that I viewed it through a different lens.
It appears that I am not alone in using this lens.
MS used be "new, shiny," but now, they are "blue chip."
I don't equate their properties with "fun," but I do believe they are serious about "let's get some work done," which jives with my lens.
FWIW, I see GitLab and Bitbucket as more focused on the tooling and business-first aspects.
And since creating my first repo there, I’ve always seen GitHub as a social platform for gaining notoriety within the open source community.
That said, I have never thought about it as the fulcrum for social networking along those lines. I have considered developer communities, like this one, or specialized ones, as places to connect, and GH as a "gallery," where we can send people to view our portfolio, after we have connected, or to "vet" contacts, like employers.
My experience with GH, is that the folks that really generate the most energy, are the JavaScript/Python/Full-Stack communities. I am an Apple software specialist, and there's not really the same energy, in that community, on GH, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I don't see it the same way as JS folks.
It also has a great API, and people have written some nice tools for it. The API is probably not unique (or even the best one), but it is well-supported by third parties.
I'm an Apple native developer. We aren't usually high on anyone's list.
One big fad from 50+ years ago that I'd welcome is folders. I don't want to just have all my repositories appear in a flat list ordered by time since last update. I want to make folders so I can organize repositories by topic--just like I have my repositories organized in my computer.
That is just dumbing yourself down in favor of machine classification or search algorithms while a simple solution exists for this problem for higher order classification and context, which tags alone fail to provide, even with sorting.
A tag with a single entry is useful. Chapters should never have a single entry.
Folders are great for when you don't know what you want and just want to browse or explore based on broad topics. Tags/indexes are better when you know basically what you want, and you just need a way to find it or items similar to it.
I don’t like being restricted to single folders, but I’d love to symlink projects into multiple folders.
This would work out well if they just added some graph functionality among tags.
Here's an example.
You know because in Github you can't even sort your list of repositories.
We started out not knowing what anything should look like, we didn't even know what computers were suppose to do. Everything had to be envisioned and implemented. Different approaches were taken for a lot of things. Eventually we just know how something should work. At that point it can be abstracted away.
Similarly lots of things should stay in JS. If we've experimented and evolved to the point where we know how something should work we should grow beyond modules and have build in methods for it.
It is happening but much to slow in my opinion.
Say, we have a Date API, are week numbers a thing or not? Are they an unpredictable poorly understood thing? Does it bother anyone if the API supports it?
Everything should be able to migrate up and down from the metal to the highest level of abstraction depending on how much we use it.
edit: There is no point shipping [table] sort magic to the client on every page view that needs it.
(Also, you can do an HTML table sort in about 10 pretty short lines of code[1], so this seems like a kind of weird hill to die on.)
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14267781/sorting-html-ta...
IOW: If there is a table it doesn't hurt to be able to sort it by default.
The example is great! 10 lines... no wait... 30 lines... then you have something that... or no wait, it sorts numbers alphabetically. The cursor is wrong. There is no accessibility. The little arrows are missing ▲ ▼ did I pick the right ones? They look bulky, better add another span inside the th? Oh I clicked the th twice now the text is highlighted.
Why should I need to implement this myself? I'm not inventing anything new? I don't want to be dealing with colspan but we all know how it should work? I know its wrong but I usually leave out the <thead>, tables render just fine without it but when something generates tables like that the script needs to be re-examined to figure out why it doesn't work. There is some unknown number of other ways to break it.
A default implementation could deal with some common units out of the box. Monday could go in front of Tuesday, 50 cm could be smaller than 1 m, $100 could be bigger than $20. Just the simple obvious stuff. For everything else something like <th sort="foo"> with: foo = (a,b) => a.length - b.length
List items are a bit less obvious but I'm sure we can think of something sensible. Perhaps sorting by child class?
What is the drawback?
Also, it's difficult to tell which comment is associated with which commit.
And there isn't enough pressure on GitHub or GitLab to clean up their act because most people don't even know what they're missing. And so the cycle continues.
Also, having a single commit touching many parts of the code makes it harder to revert due to a greater chanche of conflicts with other commits.
Pull requests in Git were designed for trusted, frequent collaborators. I.e., project maintainers that are routinely syncing with one another. It's not supposed to be the preferred mechanism for ordinary contributions, and certainly not for drive-by contributions.
My biggest gripe, though, is that the on-GitHub fork from the first paragraph will live on in my namespace forever, unless I manually prune it. And even if I do prune it, I still have no way to control the fact that GitHub has silently set up a social networking timeline to broadcast a centralized index of all this activity to anyone and everyone, without asking me, and without a way to manage the stuff that goes into the timeline, control who it's shared with, or turn it off completely.
If everyone had to pay $1 to submit an issue and/or a pull request, open source projects would get a lot less "support spam" :)
Also, it would certainly help if people need to wait 10 minutes for their last comment to be accepted into the network before they're allowed to comment again.
I dunno, that seems odd. Do you not want to know about bugs in your project to make it better? I realize people will submit a bug b/c they can't figure out how to implement something but that is worth being aware of real bugs in the code.
Now if you could "tax" the "+1" spam culture, I'd be all aboard that
/cries
This blog post seems to indicate Python, Ruby, and Go: https://github.blog/changelog/2019-11-13-code-navigation-is-...
I'm sure that will increase over time.
but git is already a blockchain. each commit is a "block", with a reference back to the previous commit.
It's pretty funny how people still think that a blockchain is this magical thing, yet I'm pretty sure anyone on HN is capable of writing a blockchain in an an hour or two. Maybe even less than that.
I demo’d github and described the distributed features with pull requests and stuff “oracle-based mediation.”
It was funny because this was maybe 3 years ago and had never heard about GitHub but had read all the blockchain literature.
So they should add 2018 me-too fad features?
Great point. I haven't used a social network yet that didn't result in me becoming at least a little addicted at one point or another. In high school, I was constantly on Twitter, seeking the dopamine rush from those likes and retweets. Getting out of there has done wonders for my personal life.
And I think the Web Development community could do with a decent break from "new" as well. What would be great is if we could just prune some of the gajillion frameworks and libraries already out there, and spend some time to make the ones we keep decently robust and elegant.
- a like ("I want to let the creator know I like this.")
- a share ("I want my followers to know about this.")
- a bookmark ("I want to be able to find this again later.")
Most social networks only have the first two. GitHub, even worse, only has one. (I personally use stars exclusively as bookmarks, btw.)
I wouldn't "like" project that are broken or half done, but I star it if it can solve my problem.
On the other side, when somebody stars my project I will invest more energy into it because I see that it is useful to somebody else, not just me. Most of my projects are sparsely tested, because usually I'm the only user and it is not mission-critical. When it's broken I usually know where. When I see starts appearing on my project I add more tests and handle edge cases better, so new users have a better experience. If they would only bookmark it, I wouldn't know if somebody wants to use my software. And they would also have a bad experience, and maybe drop it after evaluating as a piece of crap.
The better value proposition lift from giving folks and teams more free private repos was huge, and the increasingly-prominent integration of Github into enterprise tools is facilitating (if not helping to force) the modernization of enterprise dev outside the software industry.
I've never been a bigger fan of Github, personally. Microsoft seems to be doing the same with Github that it did with Minecraft: amplifying what it does well, fixing what it didn't, and making it more accessible to more folks the way they want to consume it — all while not compromising what made it great to begin with.
The Bedrock edition introduced paid resources which would never have been a thing in the Java edition. Instead of considering cross-play to support the amazing work the CraftBukkit/Spigot devs, they opted to create a new protocol and split the player base. I didn't like the direction where Windows 10 Edition was heading, but I'm glad that there are still thousands of players on Java.
All of my "big" projects on GH have more than one repo, usually 2-5 depending on what all work needs to be done. Before GH allowed you to create private repos in orgs for free I had hundreds of repositories and had to name them like projectname-website. Now I create orgs for my biggest projects so all my repos are starting to look more like projectname/website instead.
I'll admit, very small change but helps me keep my Github organized.
---
Overall Github has gotten only more and more important in my workflow. I find it amazing that this site went from "cool tool" back in my college years to "I literally cannot live without this tool" now.
I thought this was always the point of Organizations..?
Being able to nest orgs will be great so it’s still easy to organize an entire org as well as the ability to drill down.
Even better would be a tag-like structure where orgs can have relationships other than hierarchies. Topics doesn’t really do this now, but maybe could if they improve the topic search.
I'm not implying that I would face all of these issues on Github currently. But I don't want to run the risk of being in that position and getting into a shouting match with someone - and then having to deal with all of the consequences.
Feels like early gitlab but even more craigslisty.
The git.sr.ht service is just the tip of the iceberg, though. It also provides you with CI, issue tracking, mailing lists... And it works perfectly in Lynx so you don't even have to leave command line to use the browser interface.
Previously I would just put my pet projects on Bitbucket because they offered free private repos.
If you want to keep using your colonialism-inspired language, go ahead and ignore the critics (surely you can't believe github is going to ban you over it) but do not complain about this criticism existing because it makes you uncomfortable that someone does not like the language you use. That's not very liberal.
It's not colonialism inspired language though.
Edit: I also love the irony of invoking liberalism as a justification for silencing dissent.
I would say someone will respond (were all not liberal).
And that this is beyond liberal and conservatism. This about signaling and human decency. Words make people uncomfortable and words have history.
Btw. "dumb" is an ableist slur.
who has made this accusation?
The React props and mount thing is just ludicrous...unfortunately the people with the most extreme viewpoints often shout the loudest.
Rage mobs aren't new, they still can cause plenty of damage and ruin careers.
I think there's no global intent. There's no formalized group that has a weekly agenda of "Destroy Opensource!"
> It is simultaneously possible that plenty of individuals have uninformed, clumsy approaches to a topic
Right and this is what I mean by the crusade/rage mob analogies. Somebody gets upset about something, and they may be genuinely offended (and still wrong), so they go to Reddit/Twitter/etc and create a post "I can't believe X is doing Y! They're evil and we should stop them!"
Now, there's a whole bunch of people who don't have nuanced well researched opinions on X or Y. They just want to be upset and have a good fight, and this is a nice convenient thing that feels just to fight about. So they hop on and start jumping in on a side. This is why I use the crusade analogy - you don't care about the pretense, you're just in it for the battle.
The issue with rage mobs, whether it's in regards to the open source community or what broadcasters can air on television, are purely destructive. They don't care about fixing problems, they have no interest in improving the community or advancing things, they simply want to join in a fight and express anger. If a rage mob gets it's demands (you cancel that sitcom that portrays a gay family positively) then the mob doesn't go away - it just finds something else to attack and eventually it attacks itself.
Arguably it is much harder and will face much more resistance if GitHub attempted to solicit internship programs, scholarship grants, and supported programs necessary to churn the wheels on rolling back the factors preventing our field from being friendly to a broader demographic set of people.
It is much harder but through signaling we raise the importance of the issue and increase the likelihood for action.
(Also, I think that criticism that only language changes are relatively useless is not without some substance. If we had more BIPOC in our workplaces and leadership, and it is something black people in tech advocate for, then it is a problem that would solve itself because tech companies would have to choose between losing their CTO/CIO/Chief Architect/Director of Technology Platform Worth $$$$$ and adjusting their language to be welcoming to their employees.)
I think it’s easy to dismiss conversations like master/slave whitelist/blacklist as overly PC or childish. I certainly don’t appreciate the overly-preachy feeling I sometimes get from people pushing their point of view. And my nature is to find pleasure in giving The Man the proverbial finger. The self righteousness can be intentional on their part, of course, but many times it’s not. I honestly get the similar feelings about the diet-of-the-year fad, too. I have been very lucky in life so far, in that I haven’t struggled with weight or the negative impacts of racism. But I’m discovering that language is an incredibly powerful tool for changing deeply-rooted habits, like which foods you find comfort in, or your default reaction to conflict. When I’ve become an unwilling participant in these changes, I have to ask myself: what is the balance of pros/cons for me and for others? Also, what is my net influence on others who are attempting to do good (no matter my opinion on its effectiveness)? I don’t think I’ve ever changed the default branch for any GitHub repo I’ve worked with. It should theoretically cause no issues at all, I suppose, but I can’t state that with certainty. So there’s a bit of a challenge that I’ll actually enjoy. And I’m not aware of any culture or richness of vocabulary that depends on the dynamic of this set of nomenclature. Besides, I still see words like “serf” and “lord” on a semi-regular basis despite it’s remove from our lifestyles, so these words aren’t disappearing any time soon. On the other hand, it’s hard to deny that racism has scarred our society very deeply. I remember being shocked when my wife told me how young age was when someone first attempted to take advantage of her for sex. I recently felt the same level of shock when my friend told me that she gets called the n word multiple times every day. If our vocabulary can change our mindset, then maybe removing the master/slave dynamic can be a net positive, like removing the vocabulary of war from our daily interactions. We end up turning to other defaults instead of the old ones. Maybe we end up no better off, and decide to change again. Who knows? But personally I don’t see a lot of downside in the attempt to better our world.
I'm not sure what you mean by "removing the vocabulary of war".
> But personally I don’t see a lot of downside in the attempt to better our world.
I see tons of downsides; people are losing their livelihoods over the mere appearance of impropriety defined by activist narratives. Putting so much weight into these types of things may unexpectedly cause us to view social justice in the hollow terms of performative things like word choice instead of actual equality, etc.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/06/case-for-liberal...
Along similar lines, this guy that got booted from a climate change event for a past tweet that mildly linked COVID-19 and China:
>"COVID has taught us that the world is far more interconnected that we originally thought...we can’t always put ourselves first at the expense of others.
>
> It’s also made us realize that we are far too dependent on—and gracious to—China."
The problem is in the unintended consequences. Once we started accommodating requests to change potentially-problematic words at my last company, those words went from "possibly problematic to someone" to "officially confirmed as offensive by company policy".
From that point forward, many people assumed that anyone accidentally using those words had ill intent. This peaked when an interviewer chastised a candidate for referring to the "master branch" during an interview. We also had someone try to cause problems because our Linux systems had "man pages", which they believed was proof that Linux distributions were sexist. It's one thing to search/replace your documentation for a specific word, but just wait until you have a team of people brainstorming complex plans to remove "man pages" from every Linux PC and server in the company.
Ironically, once we stopped making company-endorsed efforts to navigate problematic vocabulary, the number of people offended or insulted started to decline. The policies had the opposite of the intended effect.
It's one thing to make a personal effort to use a less contentious vocabulary. I have no problem with that, nor should anyone else. However, the problems come when using industry-standard vocabulary is assumed to have ill intent. No one wants to operate in an environment where they can be declared to be racist, sexist, or otherwise prejudiced for using a basic technology term without ill intent.
That's becoming a thing at my current job. I'm just accepting that I will eventually slip (or even just fail to keep up with the trendy list of bad words) and get fired.
Guess it's better than being eaten by a bear.
This is a really interesting example. Naively, I'd expect the meaning of a word to matter.
Do you know if the person advocating for this understood the etymology?
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...
But even the use of the word "master" as it relates to the primary copy seems to be related to a master, as in one who guides or rules others. So that seems to still be related to the master/servant relationship. I'm not an etymologist, so someone could point an error here.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/master
The point isn't that every person from Linus on has been engaged in a giant conspiracy to spread hate via git repos (Side note: would there be a secret code you can interpret by arranging hashes in a particular order?). The point is really that our language and culture contain countless reminders of the belief that not all people should be treated with equal value, to the point that we've been using them without regard to or even understanding of their impact.
What I find funny is that the 'vocabulary of war' gets about 100000000x more actual discussions of war and how the US is regularly killing people and has been engaged in ongoing war for 20 years and about 1000s of other way more harmful things.
Apparently nobody gives a single shit about that stuff.
I don't really care about changing the vocabulary for these technical terms and enough people go crazy over it then lets just change it so I don't have to deal with the discussion. I certainty wont waste any energy defending the master/slave terminology, I doesn't really make any sense anyway in DBs specially.
Changing the default away from 'master' in git seem totally pointless as the term master is not only used in a master/slave context but in many other context as well. Its not like we have the master branch and slave branches. Again, I also don't care if we change it.
One of the issue with white/black is that the night bad, day good dynamic goes back 10000s of years. The same patterns exist in African and eastern religion and imaginary, so not sure purging all use of the color black for 'bad' is sensible.
Is the term Blackmagic or Black Humor also offensive now? I don't even no. I like Black metal, is that offensive? I hope not because that would be taking it to far.
"Cop" suddenly became a problematic word and you can read the comments in that issue thread. Imagine you have some repo like "PinkKitty", and then someone blows himself up dressed in pink and pink becomes a symbol of Jihad or White Supremacy or what have you. The same kind of people will then come to your repo and harass you and your unpaid work.
> emilyst commented 11 days ago I live in a country with a real dictator (although not on paper), unchecked police that's just an instrument in the hands of the government, and while no one here has any fondness of the Bulgarian police as an institution or our cops, I don't have any issues with the words "police" and "cop".
"works on my machine"
Additionally I haven't seen a single comment that is "acerbically against it" just calm people making reasonable arguments to not virtue signal. Especially in a way that doesn't even make sense.
When people complain about the OSS community and github this is what they mean. A bunch of rando's who had nothing to do with a project chiming in with breaking changes bec of their feelings. It really is a great example of what the GP is talking about.
A ton of people out there want to prove to themselves more than anyone else that they care about this by doing totally meaningless things like renaming a project that has been maintained and used by thousands of people for YEARS and known throughout the entire (international) community as rubocop with all the reputation, tooling, clout, etc. built over the years, and completely destroy all of that just because you're sad and you feel like doing something to make yourself feel better.
The level of entitlement is just over the top. You don't like the name, fork it, rename it, and use that fork. Advertise it if you want. Don't come and demand from maintainers that have worked on this for years, for exactly zero dollars, to do such a thing. Honestly this is just another thing that turns me off from open source development.
The project name is a pun on a science fiction movie, if the (unpaid) maintainer does not want to change it for compatibility reasons, that's entirely understandable. People should donate money or contribute substantial code effort towards the name change if they care enough.
"Works on my machine" is shorthand for the flippant dismissal that, "I don't need to care about that bug because it didn't show up or cause problems in a deliberately ideal environment."
The repo author is saying the opposite, that it "works" even in "non-ideal environments". That is, he has no inherent negative association with "cop" even in a near-dictatorship where, in practice, most cops are bad and work with impunity, since he thinks the concept is legit (enforcing law and order) even if particular jurisdictions get it wrong.
So, if anything, he was saying, "it even works on forgotten legacy systems"...
From the README:
>The goal of this project is for the rubocop folks to merge this back into rubocop project, and rename its org/repo/domain/etc >The goal is NOT to maintain an ongoing parity fork of an active project
Insanely entitled in my book and far from what I'd call calm or reasonable.
Was it sudden? I mean black people have been being harassed and killed by cops for a long time. Is this only recently on your radar?
A bunch of people suddenly start trying to capitalize on current events to look good → the word cop is treated like a profanity.
(See how that works?)
The only people derailing that thread by being hostile or aggressive are the people who oppose the suggestion.
Another similar change that's rapidly approaching is renaming the master branch to main (which, again, seems like a superior choice to me even divorced from the larger cultural context).
GIMP wasn't even a good name.
RuboCop is probably a trademark violation. I wouldn't have known it was a linter without another post in here mentioning a fork that changes the name. It's the first result on Google for "ruby linter," but it's half a page down on DuckDuckGo.
I didn't really have a problem with "master," but it does seem like it tracks back to master/slave tapes based on a mailing list post, and there are clearer terms to use.
And so on. If people are going to call to arms over a name or term, can it at least be one worth defending? For an industry that worships at the altar of Move Fast And Break Things, some people get extremely conservative about strings of glyphs.
It'd be one thing if these changes weren't improvements, but they are, and opposing them solely because someone you perceive to be an "SJW" is proposing them is overly reactionary.
Interestingly, there is no consensus on what terms are the best to replace master/slave.
Django uses follower/leader. Drupal uses primary/replica. Openssl uses parent/child.
Also, that link isn't even that bad in the grand scheme of arguments I've been involved in online. It's no proverbial shark attack. You can easily just ignore it and move on with your life.
If I were to reach a bit and try to look under the hood at what might be going on, I'd wonder if this behavior is itself an expression of white privilege in America. After all, these demands are based on the idea that one can change usage patterns overnight in one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. To try to exert so much immediate control over something that cannot be owned and that exists far beyond this one country seems to be a very privileged position to take.
> The white liberal aren’t white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. The same as the white conservative is a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro, 20 million black people. A political football, a political pawn, an economic football, and economic pawn. A social football, a social pawn. The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative. So that anything that the Negro does is never for his own good, never for his own advancement, never for his own progress, he’s only a pawn in the hands of the white liberal.
I'm not saying every "white liberal" is like that, or even that they are doing it consciously, but looking at things like this makes me think the people who are arguing for the name change are doing it so they can feel good about themselves while solving a "problem" that wasn't really a problem.
Additionally, I'm not against changing hurtful terminology, but when I see white men arguing white men about what is best for other races or sexes, I kind of roll my eyes. As a white man, I kind of feel my role in all this is should be to listen, understand, and follow.
That may sound preposterous, but it's making the same claim as the rest of the moral panic over names in tech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red%E2%80%93black_tree#Histo...
If they did, it doesn't sound like it would affect you if you already keep your repos locally anyway.
Your point is totally valid, but I don't think that means that GitHub is a bad storage medium. It does mean that it's smart to always keep local copies of your code, as is true for anything one might keep in the "cloud".
This would genuinely make me migrate off github permanently, both for personal projects and work.
>project chat
IRC/Slack/Discord already exist
>or even DMs
A new avenue for recruiter spam? No thank you.
A-men.
There is absolutely nothing of value on LinkedIn for the average person beyond being a place to host your resume for discovery.
Sometimes I come across people whose idea of a perfect world is an app that knows exactly what to show them and when without any curiosity or effort, and it blows my mind. That is my hell.
The Reddit python subreddit is truly awful - it's just beginners sharing their first projects.
Whereas HN is largely biased to what's extremely popular and/or "cool".
> IRC/Slack/Discord already exist
Or even closer: gitter! Or just set up an irc/matrix room for your project.
I don't like their (electron) desktop app, I always end up using the IRC bridge if any
There's a discussion feature on beta (see https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/discussions for example)
I'd definitely like this to become public soon
Laughing in LKML
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 pandemic. It promptly was given significant attention, reasons were found to declare it "uncool", and Jitsi was elevated as the next "cool" replacement.
This article confirms that GitHub is now exiting the early adopter phase. Significant attention is being paid to it, reasons are being found to declare it "uncool" — but, no replacement has yet been elevated as the next "cool" replacement for it.
What will GitHub's replacement "cool" service be?
on:
push:
branches:
- "**"https://github.blog/2019-08-08-github-actions-now-supports-c...
The alpha was rougher (and completely different) but that's why it was called an alpha!
When I worked with gitlab CI, I've read through the documentation, understood immediately how it works, and had a pipeline up and running half an hour later.
When github actions was started, I approached it with the same mindset as I approached (for instance) travis.ci, AppVeyor or gitlab CI. But after reading through the github action documentation I had no idea how to make this work for a CI/CD workflow, so I ignored it and continued using travis.ci and AppVeyor for my github projects. Only roughly a year later the above mentioned CI/CD support was added to github actions, which finally made it useable in the same way as all the other CI services.
So my suspicion is: github actions was going to be a new "revolutionary" thing with a much wider scope than existing CI/CD solution. But most people didn't understand such a "visionary" concept, and instead just wanted a simple CI/CD service similar to all the 3rd party solutions that already existed, only better integrated with the rest of github.
And that's why I think that gitlab's integrated CI/CD service makes a lot more sense. It was much more focused on the developer's needs from the beginning.
I'm not sure what you think was "bolted on" to actions, could you be specific? Features have been added (during the beta and since) but I can't think of anything that could really be described as "bolted on". "bolted on" to me implies some kind of disharmony with other features, weird quirks etc.
> I seriously didn't understand what problems github actions were intended to solve
You can run arbitrary code in response to any GitHub repository event, and also cron jobs and external triggers (a GitHub app can POST to a specific API to trigger those style of workflows).
The code runs with access to GitHub APIs for your repo (it can clone it, leave comments, create new PRs, whatever), and in any event that is associated with a PR a check status gets added to the PR.
This is a pretty general-purpose tool and I think it's easy to imagine the kind of problems people would use it to solve...
> my suspicion is [...]
Honestly it sounds like you're not really familiar with it and have some strongly negative opinions. I'd recommend either giving it another look and putting aside your feelings or working on a more substantive critique...
I mean, I get the "new" Microsoft. And I get that this is mostly a street-cred move by them, and they'll try to not mess it up by interfering with it. But still. That's now. What happens when the next shake-up comes and there's a push by the accountants to make money off everything, that's the important bit.
It's like Atlassian taking over Trello. They'll mess it up, it's just a matter of when not if.
Before that they were their own company. And as far as I know, the source was never OSS to begin with. Microsoft didn't swoop in and lock it down. It was already like that.
In case anybody wondered if Github was closed-source because of Microsoft.
While GitHub remains the "home" of open source (at least for cool, hip JavaScript projects).
Based on Hacker News threads, SourceHut is challenging GitHub in "coolness" too. ️
Whilst GH has duplicated these features very recently, they are still things that are at the core of gitlabs offering, so are generally higher quality and better supported.
Gitlab is also open source, which lets me mirror their repo locally in case they die or remove a feature I use.
Oh, and gitlab isn't systematically racist, which is always a personal ethical win.
Shout out to sourcehut as a possible next cool thing - currently in public alpha
https://todogroup.org/members/
Discussion of the code-of-conduct:
* https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/107#issuec...
Wait, what? How is GitHub "systematically racist"?
> Shout out to sourcehut as a possible next cool thing - currently in public alpha
Sourcehut seems like a niche product for a niche audience. That's not a criticism – if anything, that's a compliment because too often people with niche needs or preferences are left out in the cold, but I don't think it'll be anywhere near the "next GitHub".
It's a paid subscription website and has done very well as a one-man-army project. Its success hasn't compromised its virtues of being lightweight and no-nonsense (unlike Delicious).
If SourceHut could do the same for Git that would be great.
It already does. Other than some (minor) missing features that are in active development, what else do you need?
Both the original story as well as the comments regarding Andrew's usage for Zig.
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 you're okay with that then that's your choice, but for me it really turned me off sourcehut.
No, not really, if done politely. Which seems to be the case here.
It also might "work" to use a large crystal vase as a hammer, but it's still "doing it wrong".
If anything, I'd fault sr.ht for having too vague usage policies and then telling users they are in violation of said policies. That's not good. But they are in alpha, so hopefully it's something that'll improve.
Similar thing happened on Github with CocoaPods: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652.
Just because something works doesn't mean it is a suitable implementation or a sensible decision.
Using git and mercurial for large binary file storage is, 100%, wrong. Why? They're not designed for it, so they handle it really poorly. Hacks like Git LFS and annex were made for a reason.
From sourcehuts perspective, they need to serve all their customers, and an extreme performance outlier for a still small platform could degrade the experience for others by becoming a significant part of the server load. Thus, it's fair to say no.
Just like Github did back in the day to CocoaPod: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652. They also got very unhappy.
And the ability to create a repo on their site by just pushing to a remote with the right name[1] has really made it easier for me to use their service. What do you find confusing and poor about the UI? I find it straightforward and efficient.
I do use the find-file feature on Github a lot, as well as the quick file editor. Both are missing here, but I kind of see that at least the file editor is not well suited to the projects ethos.
It can be whatever people want to use it for. The customisation and the key features of the tool are not bad. Then again, most tools are neutral until a person wields them.
[Edit typo]
I have endured all, from web forms storing their data via Perl CGI scripts to Excel sheets which require a PhD in VBA macros to change anything.
Still a great fan of Trac. Old but gold, simple and fast. Suffers a bit from a historical focus on SVN, but can be adapted to git easily.
I get that Jira can be poorly configured, but it's not Lotus Notes bad.
Yes exactly that, i think for bit-bucket it would have been less damaging NOT to support git but exclusively mercurial..and maybe bitkeeper ;)
I'm not the biggest Atlassian fan, but they posted in August last year, gave 10 months notice and cited that less than 1% of new repos being created are using mercurial as their primary reason for doing so. If you cared about a project, almost a year is plenty of time to move it. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to sunset a feature that is not widely used by your users, not widely used outside of your userbase, and that requires ongoing maintenance that the other 99% of repositories could benefit from instead.
That's not OK and I'm clearly very, very angry as a former user.
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 were paying customers before this? I don't know the answer offhand, but if I had to guess, I'd suspect a small number of them.
> That's not OK and I'm clearly very, very angry as a former user.
I hope as a paying customer, you cancelled your subscription to them and told them explicitly why then.
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).
I've transitioned with companies from Github to Gitlab, from Bitbucket to GitHub etc. but never to Bitbucket. In fairness I was using Gitlab during their great outage, so I can say that cool is not always reliable. And coolness fades and dies relatively fast.
But I can't remember Bitbucket ever being cool.
I am yet to find something that works as good as Atlassian products.
Individually they all have a lot of flaws to the point that if they only existed on their own, no one would use them. But features like native support for referencing Jira issues in Confluence and having them auto-update makes companies want to use it.
Part of it, I think, is the development tool version of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It's considered the safe choice. Enterprise-y companies get wooed by all the "Atlassian consultants" floating around out there. The ecosystem is just designed to attract enterprise users.
Fair enough, I agree - they are not that poorly integrated as they are just really poor tools.
Their tools are remarkably slow, with each page both being remarkably JavaScript-heavy and constantly reloading (the two should be mutually exclusive, right?).
They really aren't bad, and have some advantages, but they are not a joy to use.
Hopefully this will be ForgeFed [0] standards support, allowing forges such as github, github, gitea, sourcehut, notabug, etc. to interoperate via ActivityPub-based federation.
ForgeFed opens walled gardens and allows anyone to interact with any repo with a single account regardless on where it resides. It is still in early development stage, but received funding from NLNet which will be distributed among contributors working on roadmap items [1]. Additionally feedback is requested via the Feneas forum [2] so make yourself heard :)
[0] https://forgefed.peers.community/
But is GitHub big enough they can just ignore it and go "bah we're too big now to care about others"?
I made a typo (`git show` not `show show`) and the last one is from https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/
I had no idea Github had a "trending" mechanism. I just use it as a free place to store code repositories, of which I have about 20. About the only social feature of Github I use is "Issues", to report or deal with bugs.
In fact, I rarely visit the site with a browser. Most usage is from "git". Which is what it's supposed to be for.
Sounds like this article doesn't apply to you then.
>Which is what it's supposed to be for.
That's just your opinion. Clearly people have been using github for discovering new software and more. I have found plenty of cool projects through the sites features.
The author uses the phrase `the new JavaScript “hotness”` in the context of this somehow being a positive. Engineers going after libraries because of their "hotness" instead of because of their utility is exactly the problem with the Javascript (and other "cool" / "trending") ecosystems.
If you're not one of them, and feel alone and outdated - don't. There's enough graybeards toiling away at the boring software that supports the world, oblivious of what killed last week's React killer. This too shall pass.
Maybe the author is a very engaged developer who already knows a huge part of the “boring software that supports the world”? Maybe he is so engaged that he wants to follow new developments in his professional area to get even better? Maybe he hopes that he will discover new and interesting algorithms that can help him improve his skills?
I think there is a point that simple algorithms are a better user interface, because of their predictability (although they show their flaws, like he specifically mentions with JS). Just try to remember how much discussion there was about Twitter’s feed and their move away from a classic timeline. They still haven’t abandoned the latter one.
But who knows in the end? Maybe your comment was just an attempt of satire a la The Onion? Personally I try not to prematurely judge and stay positive. To each his own I guess.
If you're going to non-curated "trending" feeds looking for things that are already popular to pay attention to, you're not only wasting your finite free time but you're training yourself to be a follower.
Stop this nonsense immediately. Use your talents and build something great. If you never check the "trending" page on GitHub again, you will have a better life.
I'm not trying to be an asshole: focus is both incredibly hard and the only way to build great things.
There are a countless number of things you're better off doing than checking out new random shit. Those people have already had their success. What are you bringing?
Github is not meant to be fun, it's meant to be like a pen.
A good pen can be enjoyable. Beautiful. You can feel attachement to it.
But it is not built to be played with. By that I mean it's not its primary function, even if a creative or bored mind can use it for that.
A good pen fullfills its intended purpose when it disapears from your mind while you use it, yielding to the writting that should be the center of your attention.
I don't think about github when I code. I just use it.
Before the usual "just leave" comments: GH is a monopoly and one can be forced to use it, unless leaving includes leaving projects or even jobs.
Nobody said, "I can't wait to click on githubs buttons!"
But they might have said, "I can't wait to make this code available".
The choices on the trending page do seem weird, and kind of useless.
> ... lot project discovery has moved to other platforms, and more specifically, to Twitter. This isn’t good for the community.
Let me bring out my 2 points here:
#1: Hey, please ask your inner self why would you ever want to put out your own free labor out on the Internet in the first place? For common good? World peace?
I bet most people will answer: Be cool, be known, receive attention etc. Those GitHub stars&fork you've received will help you in your next job hunt, it will help you when you trying to introduce yourself to the other devs, it will help you to expand your people network. In short, those free labor generates something good for you.
But GitHub has it's own limits. On GitHub, your projects are discovered/used by other devs, a bubbles of it's own kind. Further, those devs might not even want to give you stars because they're above your level and/or found your project uninteresting to them.
Social medias generate those "good"s better than GitHub simply because it got wider range of people, and greater chance to found somebody who is interested to try out your project.
#2 and more important: The GitHub Trending page itself is really poor when it comes to discover new things.
Just think: What's on that page? "Most stared today" list. Well yeah, then where are those stars came from? Right?
It's a "Trending" page, that's it. Not a "Hey, checkout these exciting repositories recommended just for you" page and certainly not "Hey, come here and checkout my new repo which currently got zero star but it's really cool" page.
I personally found ProductHunt, Hacker News and Reddit is a better source if I do want to "Discover" something new. Which I guess is why people are posting their projects there (as well as on Twitter and Facebook and other platforms).
THIS.
The new algorithm is not only horrendous but SUPER FLAWED!
Here is what happened.
After receiving 900+ stars within a week of launch - we never make it to 'Trending' weekly or monthly!! We were their trending for 3 days. Then all of a sudden we are gone. The rest of the repos which were trending with us with as little as 50 stars are in weekly/monthly trending!!!
Can you please help explain this @Github ?
When contacted Github support about this flaw - the reply was short (they dont wanna reveal their buggy algorithm! I was asking to look at the problem not to defend their solution)
Stars not only tell how cool a open source project is but also makes the new open source developers produce valuable work without next to nothing in return.
Just taking out this small dopamine rush translates to this - a good company (Github) was acquired by an old-enterprise.
Stars aren’t payment. If that is the primary currency for your development I am curious what happens when there are no new stars? Do you kill the repo?
Strange measure of coolness.
Thus I always felt a little weird about the hype around the number of stars.
With all that, stars have basically lost all meaning to me if I'm looking at it as a project outsider, and only have limited meaning as a maintainer.
It just make sense for them to integrate GitHub with LinkedIn somehow.
Author is correct, the "trending" now rendered on GitHub is a joke.
But what is worse is the "Explore" screen they put in. All I get given is a bunch of useless crap in a column that is 580 pixels wide. Half of the projects that appear in here are in chinese so I can't understand anything about them except the project title. The entire UX of this screen feels like a social network.
Bonus points: Another, stupid, pointless feature they added a while back: "[emoji] Set status".
This works well in two senses:
1. We went from a flawed meritocracy (GitHub) to a social network that promotes chaos, tribalism, and idea bubbles (Twitter).
2. GitHub went from a flawed meritocracy to a social network that promotes chaos, tribalism, and idea bubbles (CoCs, them-vs-us narratives, a priori victimization, non-universal notions of "inclusiveness", "master branches").
Early Twitter were the golden years in my eyes. You could ask a question or post an idea and get responses from random developers. Now it's just echoes into the ether.
> The Trending page used to be a straight-up list of the projects with the most new stars in the last 24 hours across the whole site (and by language).
...
> In this era of Developer Relations, VC-backed open source, and the endless developer-content-bullshit machine, the old Trending page was one of the few places left on the web where it seemed like the best ideas still won.
I've been seeing corporate projects beg for stars (from either employees or users) for almost a decade now. Meanwhile, I have never asked for stars on my personal repos and I think most people don't. If you don't like companies putting their finger on the scale, stars are the absolute last thing to measure!
> The worst side effect of the new Trending page is that a lot project discovery has moved to other platforms, and more specifically, to Twitter. This isn’t good for the community. We went from a flawed meritocracy ... good ideas and good projects are getting lost, especially from newcomers.
How, exactly, are newcomers supposed to get stars on their projects without a following?
Does this guy complain that his hammer fails to entertain him when pounding nails?
But I have no such aversion.
You're very clearly confusing the version control system git with the platform for code collaboration github.
The first doesn't have to be fun (and I'd argue shouldn't be fun). The latter, however, can be (maybe even should be). OP can see fun in exploring new technologies, new solutions to problems, new libraries to use - and who are we to judge that? The trending page was an interesting way to see what was cropping up around the platform. I didn't check it often, but I did check it from time to time.
sorry for expressing myself badly, but I do realize they are different things as I use bitbucket and gitlab as well.
that said I use them all as dumb, quick views for the current state of the project, with a couple of on/off switches to automate common tasks in a git project. I would like to keep my informational panels as low distraction as possible, and fun, at least as it is stereotyped in popular culture through the ages, tends to be distracting.
Same for many of the other suggested features. News feed for example.
In computers, we can make everything interact with everything, if we wanted to.
I also don't want to be at the mercy of MS implementing or removing something. It would be much better if they had many open APIs to integrate with.
It's hard for small developers who make useful things to get noticed on GitHub. The only hope is to get retweeted by some established user. This seems silly, we need better ways of making sure people can find/discover good software.
So it's hard to spotlight anonymous devs on their own, because you can't establish trust with someone who isn't known for anything yet.
Closed source seems to require more trust to me.
I think trust is very difficult to manage and do some checking of owners of PPAs before using them -- containerisation can help, but doesn't prevent information gathering and other trust-breaking activities (backdoors, etc.).
Although they've added plenty of trendy social network-y features that's what it is as its core.
There's no silver bullet for "getting noticed" whether on Github or outside of Github.
And he gives a nice and precise reason for this: the Github trending page used to have all the qualities of a game. There were ranked participants and there was a clear, known score. If you wanted to do well in the game, then you knew exactly what you had to do. As a bonus, the rules happened to be such that the ranked results were actually interesting.
Now the trending page has an opaque score. Opaque scores and rules almost never make for a fun game.
Perhaps the results are interesting. If so, how do we know that? It's hard to judge whether or not they are because we don't know the scoring mechanism. So the page loses not only its fun but its meaning as well.
I want a reliable, boring GitHub. I will look somewhere else for fun.
This is a weird article because its main point is about the 'Trending page', which is something I've never heard of in the last 10 years of using github heavily.
I'm vaguely aware there are some social features of github (you can apparently star repos, for instance) but I'd assume hardly anyone uses that stuff...
Yes, we use it for work and it's excellent, but there are loads of fun, throwaway, educational, ridiculous and interesting projects on there.
The trending page was great because it offered a glimpse of what's out there and what people are talking about. If you don't care, that's fine - it won't ever affect you. I find it interesting for the same reasons I find HN interesting.
Github has had social features for a decade or more; I've been able to follow colleagues and friends, react to issues and conversations with emojis and upload photos of my dog. What else do I need? What does Facebook have that Github doesn't in this regard?
Huh? No. I mean, I don't know what JS people do with their lives; I'm a C++ and CUDA guy (even though I dabble in some JS), and none of my acquaintances discovers projects through Twitter.
GitHub has this side-bar with projects I might find interesting and it often recommends ones that I do.
Regardless - I would move away from GitHub to someplace else if the exposure wasn't so critical. I would really like a cross-site federation mechanism which would let us try other places.
If more people who can read Chinese are using GitHub, why is it a wrong choice for GitHub to surface Chinese projects in the trending page? I detect the racist attitude here.
Yes, it is a bad recommendation, but the trending page is not personalized. GitHub does provide personalized pages for discovery. Do you get Chinese projects there too? That would be a bug worth fixing. But it is not a bug to have Chinese projects in the trending page. It is expected feature.
And actually it seems that Github just implemented this https://github.com/trending
Most stars in 24 hours? That gets the same group of 0.1% consistently at the top leading to a stale page.
So Github tried to improve its 'signaling' of what's interesting yet new so you can keep coming back to the trending page?
Is it stars the overall account crossed w/ new? Number of issues opened in 24 hours? Forks?
I return to github repeatedly to interact with repos I’ve already found based on professional need. I neither want Github to recommend content to me, nor do I need it to; I regularly use services outside of GitHub to find content on it that’s relevant to my needs.
Github is a tool, not a social network. I don’t want them to maximize for “engagement”; I want them to fill my professional requirements and charge me a fee for their services.
Otherwise we'd all still be on SourceForge or migrate to something more OSS pure like Gitlab.
That doesn't mean I necessarily need social media features.
https://github.com/nikitavoloboev?tab=stars
And before anyone asks 'why star so many repos..', I do it for super fast access of repos I am fond of with https://github.com/lox/alfred-github-jump
Plus you can sort them nicely into categories later. (https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/github-stars)
The reasoning in this blog post is why the web is full of anxiety-inducing anxiety
My opinion: Earlier, we had small problems in the page. Like 5 out of 25 in the list looked useless or wrongly listed. However now, more than half of the list looks wrongly listed and not interesting for me.
Whatever they did with that huge investment, it wasn't building value. The investors probably got their money back and then some when Microsoft bought it though..
Can you please dive into specifics a little bit and explain what parts of GitLab could be improved and what are some high-level things that you don't particularly like?
On every other Git repository manager, we can browse source code, view replies to both issues and merge requests without Javascript enabled. But not on GitLab. I don't expect anything advanced to work without Javascript, but these simple operations definitely should and I think it's very bad design to have this requirement. The result of this Javascript overuse is that GitLab is both slower and a bigger pain to use than the alternatives. Use Javascript in small amounts were it make sense for functionality, not just for showing text, pictures or other simple things.
There, my two cents. So, what I meant was that Microsoft should look at GitLab and NOT copy the web interface. GitHub has a nice web interface, with Javascript in acceptable amounts and where it make sense, even the language details bar works without.
And, IMHO, the author seems to be naive that the past system – "most new stars in the last 24 hours across the whole site" – resembled some sort of objective meritocracy, when such a metric could be trivially manipulated, especially by established tech companies.
Looking at the trending page just now [0] for Javascript, I don't see a repo owned by a big company in the top 5. freecodeCamp/freeCodeCamp is #6 and facebook/react is #8.
Here's the organization I manage: https://github.com/firebase
There is so little customization allowed on that page. It's very hard for me to tell a curious developer what's new or exciting unless I want to constantly adjust pinned repos.
Now visit this page on a laptop monitor: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-android-sdk
Notice that you're immediately presented with the folder structure and the README is "below the fold". So the developer's own words about the project are hidden unless you scroll for them. A lot of newbies get really thrown by this, they start clicking blindly into the code without knowing there are instructions below.
All that said: I love GitHub. I spent 50%+ of my day on GitHub and manage 100+ repos. But it's not all things.
- most starred repositories that haven't been in the newsletter before
- most starred repositories that were created that day
- most starred repositories
If the trending page has been an essential way for projects to gain traction, then we all have been benefiting from it. If this change disrupts that flow, then we should all oppose it, no matter if we used it directly or not.
They actually had these!
I used it occasionally. It was useful. They obviously removed it. Imagine being able to message anyone on the platform about their repo or code. Imagine it being easy to find how to contact someone. Now you have to rely on the user adding public contact information on their profile which is a) not required and b) not validated.
At some point, the sidebar would display a new set of projects almost every time you hit refresh. Now, there hardly seems to be any rotation at all; I've been seeing the same projects for weeks. Somebody should check if the cron job for updating the list has crashed :)
I would strenuously resist any attempt to make any of my tools more fun at the cost of any ounce of productivity. These tools exist to serve the narrow needs of professionals, focusing on anything other than utility for the core group is counter productive.
On the contrary to the negative sentiment in the blog, I feel GitHub "now" made it much easier to find the relevant contents and repos that I actually care about.
I'm not active on GitHub. I have an account, sometimes I file a bug or so.
Every now and then I get "invited" to some GitHub project I've never heard of. One contributor, zero stars, pure spam.
I always block those and report them as spammers.
GitHub, without fail, gets back to me saying that "oh, you can block him". That's it.
Maybe you could just stop people from spam-inviting hundreds of others? Maybe you could not allow invitations of people who never interacted with the person or his repo in any way?
But I hope they at least fixed their also very annoying notification bug where they sent me a mail that I was mentioned in a commit:
Someone had committed a binary file (image or whatever), and in there was actually a two byte sequence fitting my GitHub user name (two character name).
That's just idiotic. A few bytes in a binary do not "mention" anyone.
I used to keep up with the trends, even on the trending page, but it’s often that a big company will release something and it comes on the top. Stars are just a vanity metric, it says little about how popular is the project at the moment, how well it’s maintained, etc.
But GitHub as a company is doing so much great things lately. Actions are a nice built-in way to skip setting up a CI. And the little things which improve dealing with PRs, for example, checking the file as reviewed, review suggestions, multi-line review comments, automatically changing the base if the base is merged, and the list goes on.
It might not be fun for the trend/hype seeking, but it’s a great experience to work with it as a VCS tool.
One thing has left me wondering after reading the article, is what the algorithm has changed to if it used to be just most stars in the given time period? Does anyone have any insight in how the trending repos are ranked?
For example from the article:
> ... the notion that stripe-samples/subscriptions-use-cases, which has 13 total stars with exactly zero new stars today is the new JavaScript “hotness” is a joke.
I'm left wondering then how did that get to the top? Views? Clones? API requests? Something else like paid promotion? Or manual curation?
The whole thing would be so much more useful if it weren't wrapped up in a web interface, and if I could script my interaction with my repo's better ..
(There is a separate rant about using github stars as a metric of, well, anything, but thats a thing for a different day)
Following a range of people and checking the main feed from github.com now and then has always worked fine. Apart from some coworkers and collaborators the vast majority is people I've never interacted with, some are wellknown, many are simply folks I've come across over the years in certain fields of interest and seem active on GH.
There's a constant stream of interesting repos being worked on or starred with no real social aspect to it. As a discovery mechanism I enjoy the simplicity of it.
I didn't know about the Trending page, so I never considered using it. For my personal developer literacy and understanding of the Open Source Community, it would be great if a global Trending page existed and functioned well.
As an indy developer or a developer who usually works on a very small team, I'd like to see the Trending concept implemented on an Open Source platform basis.
For instance, a Trending in Angular page, a Trending in Bootstrap 4? Hell yes.
To me, and I'd guess to most people, Github is just a place to host git repositories, nothing else.
1. Simplify the Git interface to optimize for daily workflows
2. Assume all code is online, all the time
3. Invest in Github’s people network
4. Invest in Github’s code network
What does the toolchain for the next billion programmers look like? I’ve written the above as if I were Github, but I think there’s a fair chance they’ll miss out on a lot of this. And that might just be an opportunity for you.
(from Sam Gerstenzang)
Is there some prize I'm not aware of?
> I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Babbage was talking specifically about Members of Parliament asking him whether putting wrong figures into his machine would result in the correct answers, but I find the remark generally applicable to so much more.
What does the trending section have to do with taking the "fun" out of maintaining code?
Maybe the author is evaluating the tool by a wrong metric?
I follow several hundred repos. Only the 25 most active are listed in the sidebar. There is no way to browse the hundereds not listed there for notification tallies.
THERFORE Github now hides notifications from small and nascent repos from me, and that's definitely not fun.
honestly, I never ever knew there was a "trending" page on GH...
>>> I always thought of it as the defacto front page of the open source movement.
and I am old enough to remember freshmeat...
Isn't that super contradictory? How is the old algorithm both objective AND skewed towards Javascript?
Of course, a more fair algorithm - if your definition of fair is that multiple disciplines and specializations, and / or language get the same exposure - would be to show the top starred / most active repos in certain categories (back-end, AI, specific languages, etc).
FreshMeat was an amazing resource for new and exciting open source tools. Today ... it's pretty much just Hackernews, and we only get a small subset.
If the trending page disappeared today I wouldn't notice. In fact, the only time I ever read about it is when I stumble across blog posts that mention it.
Also, there might be other ways to find out what is "trending" (And you should try to find them).
On some days, half or more of the top 25 listed repos were Asian language.
Today, anectdotally, there are zero repos in Asian languages in the Trending Today page.
This might be a factor. Politics? Ethnocentricism?
Not sure I was ever aware of the ranking mechanics that can be so addictive if you take that sort of thing seriously.
I think I’ve relied on my projects getting stars as KPI for “are people using this?”
You are still far from it, concluding from your problem.
Up to now, I never heard about this 'trending page'. I'm quite aware, that GitHub is also a social platform business including of course the whole associated industry of for example self-marketing as the compulsory 'side' effect (the term 'side' is debatable).
For me, it is a tool and as such in the meantime not the best anymore. The missing group feature (even true for bitbucket) alone was reason enough for me to transfer the better part of my projects to GitLab and structuring them there in a sufficiently satisfying way. Some of them are still mirrored on GitHub and thats it. Not to talk about CI integration and other features.
As for some other comments here - even for me my repositories are mostly my work. Other contributions are rather short-lived PR's etc. So, this is all fine for me.
Instead he complains about the Trending feature. I did not even know there was a Trending feature, and I've been using Github since 2012.
I'd be happy to see the entirely useless "Trending" page go away, along with a lot of the social features. They take up so much screen space.
For me it's a place to do development. And it's been improving steadily on that.
And yet, it was cool as hell that everyone was on the EXACT same playing field and scoreboard."
.....................
And indeed, I don't need a social aspect, I need to make a branch from an issue, like I can with bitbucket.
I realize it could be abused, but being able to talk to people directly on the platform seems so essential...
> I always thought of it as the defacto front page of the open source movement.
It seems more like an auxiliary curiosity at best.
The turning point was the second it was sold to Microsoft. People fail to realize GitHub is Microsoft now and Microsoft is a corporation. And what corporations do best? Earn money for their shareholders. Everything else is just dust in eyes.
Now it's just useless.
It's a proprietary site!
It's actually a shame that git won over all the other DVS, because I used to find mercurial much more approachable and a lot easier to use. Mercurial maybe could be called fun, but definitely not git.
If you never used any of that it’s fine, though you missed out on a very nice side of OSS.
Please god no.
What does flawed mean in this context?
The current method is worse but seems less gameable.
Nowadays you’d have to do a mailing list.
i'm relieved its actually about a real issue