Hacker News Reader

Comment by gerner | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about Flat Data, but I'm impressed with how much GitHub is doing as GitHub since the MSFT acquisition. They continue to offer compelling services to developers, and increasingly to enterprise customers. All without abandoning much of what made GitHub great: a focus on developers and easy to access dev productivity.

Notice the prominence of the VSCode integration here. Notice the dramatically increased presence of MSFT on GitHub in general. It seems like they've managed to integrate these two cultures and product-sets in sensible ways. Given how hard big integrations like this are to pull off, I feel like the community really dodged a bullet in terms of access to products/tools.

View on HN

The OCTO DevEx team reaaaaaallly loves VS Code — beyond the editor, it's just a great surface for experimental developer tooling!

GitHub Codespaces aren't generally available yet, but being able to target both "native" VS Code as well as in-browser VS Code with the same extension is super powerful. Expect a lot more from us on that front.

We've also released a pair of little projects re VS Code development that we've extracted from our work:

https://github.com/githubocto/tailwind-vscode: a Tailwind CSS plugin which creates Tailwind color tokens for each of the VS Code theme colors, easing theme-native styling in VS Code.

https://github.com/githubocto/snowpack-vscode-extension-temp...: a VS Code extension template that incorporates the fastest toolchain with the wisdom we've accumulated about webview development.

Can you help me get a Codespaces invite? ;)

Are you https://github.com/adamcstephens?

Yes.

Makes sense, since vscode was originally a clone of github's editor atom ;) Which they are still maintaining, to their credit

Honestly, I wish I was able to get into the Codespace Preview so I could play around with a lot the experimental features it offers - Especially the tie in with Docker Desktop Dev Environments, my whole development workflow is likely going to change drastically this year.

Dodged a bullet for now.

I’m worried this is their extend-embrace stage, and the extinguish is yet to come.

I truly hate to be pessimistic, and I’m not trying to start a flame war. I just can’t see this behavior lasting in the long run.

Agree, it's important that we keep an eye on things and, however we can, hold MSFT and GitHub accountable to keep up the good showing.

We've seen new features launched (e.g. this one) long enough after the acquisition that much (most, all?) of the work happened in the post acquisition environment that I'm optimistic. But I've been wrong before.

It's already here, is just that the userbase and third parties are (happily) doing the dirty work for them. Try going GitHub-free for a month or three and you'll notice how many things rest on the assumption that you have a GitHub account. "Log in with GitHub" is essentially what Microsoft hoped for with Passport, if Passport had actually been successful.

Look at how it shat on Markdown with what it calls "GitHub Flavored Markdown". Look at the things that it calls "wikis". Look at how GitHub's PR merge tool junks up the commit log. Look at how many projects don't even have a way to accept a fix unless you submit it with GitHub's janky pull request workflow. Hell, a bug in Netlify's command-line client managed to make its way into release versions that would straight up cause the process to terminate when cwd was a repo that wasn't hosted on github.com, leading to unhandled exception.

The tacit assumption that you're using GitHub is like the tacit assumption 15 years ago that you were using Visual Studio, only this time, you can't escape just by steering clear of Windows-related tech.

I have no particular love for MSFT but I don’t think any of the issues you mentioned began after the acquisition.

...so?

They acquired a company that was doing the thing that they are wont to do and are criticized for, and have poured the significant resources at their disposal into growing the circle of impact. Where it originates from and whether it was or wasn't already independently in full swing (or partial, in this case) before their involvement doesn't matter, the effect on the user is the same. Besides that, if a person's problem with a given practice is whether or not Microsoft is the perpetrator, then that person is a hypocrite and doesn't actually give a shit about the the thing they claim to be concerned about.

GitHub Flavored Markdown seems like a nice extension to Markdown to me. Fenced code blocks? Great idea. Lots of other flavors of Markdown do the same thing. I don't know who's the leader or follower here, but I'm glad they're doing it. I'm not sure what's the gold standard for wikis, but they all seem like the kind of thing every vendor has similar, flawed, good-enough solutions for. And I know there are other thoughts around how to manage merges, but having a merge commit (or a squash merge or a fast forward) seems like a reasonable contender for handling a feature branch. But maybe there's something I'm missing? I guess any hegemony is bad for innovation?

Are there a lot of walled gardens that only allow sign-in with GitHub? That's not really an issue I've run into. I can't think of any site I want to invite my aunt/uncle/cousin to log into that only accepts GitHub login. In fact, I'm not sure there's a lot of tools I want my colleagues to use that require a GitHub login that isn't already tied to a GitHub hosted repo.

I would love to hear what I'm missing though.

The GitHub acquisition likely the single catalyst that showed me Microsoft has actually pivoted how they're approaching business, and are at least putting good faith efforts to do better.

With literally 0 actual knowledge to reference on how GitHub has felt since then, outwardly it feels like MSFT has played to all of their strengths (money, infrastructure, money, "developers, "developers", "developers" memes) and amplified what GitHub had been pushing for.

I only hope it stays going well, because it's certainly keeping me engaged in trying more MSFT products and services than I likely would've otherwise even glanced at.

The monthly downtime during working hours has been getting to me lately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com