Thank you, GitHub
github.blog
github.blog
The one time that I won't forget about Github under Nat, was when they stood up for Iranian developers [1]. They went the extra distance to get a permission/license from the US government specially to offer full Github to developers from Iran. Many other companies didn't do something similar.
[1]: https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...
Wait, that's a thing ?
We get a signup from Iran about once every month and I always, apologetically, send a personal note saying that I wish we could provide service to them but ...
You're saying rsync.net can legally provide service to Iranians with ... some paperwork ?
> And separately, we took our case to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), part of the US Treasury Department, and began a lengthy and intensive process of advocating for broad and open access to GitHub in sanctioned countries. Over the course of two years, we were able to demonstrate how developer use of GitHub advances human progress, international communication, and the enduring US foreign policy of promoting free speech and the free flow of information. We are grateful to OFAC for the engagement which has led to this great result for developers.
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...
Regarding the cost, it might be more than "some paperwork".
I don't know whether HN violates sanctions, but comparing to GitHub HN is very, very small fish. The chances that GitHub would swim under the radar were pretty slim.
Really, "this company obeys the law, so it is evil" is lame.
US sanctions, even the threat thereof, are serious business. To this day, US nationals or US tax persons are having a really hard time finding a bank in Europe that is willing to deal with them because many banks don't want any exposure to the US FATCA they can avoid.
I had an ex-girlfriend who was born in Germany to US and Greek parents. Quite the shitshow with paperwork.
Had friends working export compliance for a larger US IT company, and they once (temporarily) blocked a larger shipment to the (British) Royal Air Force because some bozo abbreviated them as "RAF" - which, obviously!, refers to the (German) Red Army Faction, a left-extremist terrorist cell that wasn't relevant for more than 10 years at that point (and wouldn't know what to do with high performance computers, anyway).
Better safe than sorry, otherwise you mess up one day, come back to the HQ on the next and all that's left is a brand new parking lot.
A lot of it probably. Also, not sure how you can collect payment from these users. And keep in mind your software might end up being used by their regime for oppressive purpose.
Keep in mind the people of Iran can end these sanctions at any time. It's a personal and societal choice.
Sorry to bite on this off-topic thing... but, _how_? Overthrowing their government? I guess that would be technically true, but "at any time" seems like a weird phrase to use for that.
Iran at least has some sort of functioning government entity (which I, to be clear, absolutely despise), Libya collapsed completely as a result of Ghaddafi's (well deserved) downfall and it will likely be a hotbed of Islamist terrorism and instability for decades to come. I don't see any nation or block of nations willing to step up and do nation rebuilding in once-beautiful Libya outside of the EU financing terrorists aka the so-called "coast guard" to torture migrants - what makes you think any kind of revolution in Iran would be assisted by anyone?
The US even abandoned the Kurds ffs.
Why? This chart should be illustrative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya#/media/File:Libya_Produc...
- Dinosaur juice that we took out of the ground
- Dinosaur farts that we took out of the ground
- Dinosaur juice that we took out of the ground and then cooked
- Shiny metal that we took out of the ground
In other words, all industries that, critically, do not require the people to operate. Libya is the poster child for the resource curse. In poor countries, democracy is a dangerous boondoggle that squanders the wealth of the country, and any country with an economy shaped like this that tries democracy will be swiftly punished for their obvious flaunting of basic economics. Likewise, all of the other things you see in these kinds of countries - sectarian violence, religious and ethnonationalist conflict, and so on - are all merely part and parcel of being poor.[0]
Taking this back to Iran... the country is born out of geopolitical praxis, not a resource curse. The US tried to utterly fuck over Iran and turn it into Libya, in the name of fighting the Soviets. So at least part of the current hostility towards the US is still borne out of actual popular support. Yes, some Iranians would like to just enjoy a cosmopolitan software developer lifestyle, but those people are fewer in number compared to the people who want nothing to do with a country that has hypocritically denied it the right to self-determination. Maybe that will change, and people on both sides will forget long enough for us to normalize trade relations. But that's not a simple matter of uninstalling and reinstalling governments like they were device drivers. Plenty of Iranians still hate the US, and plenty of Americans do, too.
[0] This is also why a lot of Donald Trump voters bought into a lot of far-right racist bullshit, as well as why many poor countries see regular genocides. Because that's exactly what you promise poor people. It's far easier to make you richer than a race or religion you don't like, than to make you richer overall.
Here’s the internal msft email
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29098640
This person at MSFT who got promoted is the one that caused the problems in the dotnet community where features that had a go-live RTM license (as in merged and ready for long term support) were removed from the programming language so that more Microsoft Visual Studio licenses could be sold.
Other items under this persons remit:
- Visual Studio
- .NET
- Python
- TypeScript
- OpenJDK
- GitHub (+NPM)
- (hint hint) Azure SDKs (hint hint)
- (hint hint) Azure PaaS / Azure Serverless (hint hint)
Honestly, I’m fine with this level of dickishness so long as it means the rest of the VS ecosystem is free-to-use.
Someone or something has to subsidise VSCode.
It would be totally fine if .NET were a closed-source, Microsoft-run language. It is pretty cool that this isn't true. But the idea that Microsoft organizationally having control over the .NET open source project is somehow bad for open source is just incomprehensible to me, who grew up on .NET not being open source at all.
It's not about open-source: it's more that major organizations and industries won't use a programming platform that is entirely at the whims of a company they have no real control over and without independent means to ensure it keeps on working, so a compromise position that Microsoft took is to make .NET open-source, so that in the event Microsoft disappears overnight (say, Mt. Rainier erupting and wiping out the Seattle metro area) people have something they can keep on using and build and maintain themselves. We saw the opposite with VB6: the VB6 platform was never open and shared and now all the companies that invested in VBA and VB6 in the 1990s is rightfully annoyed because VB6 is a complete dead-end with no feasible upgrade-path to .NET (VB.NET is not compatible with VB6).
--------
While my SaaS (and my current job) is a .NET shop because it originated with some "Classic" ASP 3.0 VBScripts that my boss put together himself in the late 1990s that was slowly transitioned through .NET WebForms (ew) and ASP.NET MVC, we still use it for new greenfield projects because .NET is a nice platform overall that scales really well from one-off prototype projects that can be easily transitioned to high-performance distributed applications without any major rewrites (the only thing I've had to "rewrite" was the conversion from .aspx (as an MVC View, not WebForms) to Razor .cshtml, everything else has been refactored through the years. The tooling and integration between MS products and services does save a lot of trouble otherwise (that's where the value is).
My experience from other shops, and the problems I've seen there is not that other "stacks" (I hate that word) like MySQL+PHP, Postgres+Python, Anything+NodeJS are somehow less capable (excepting PHP, it's often the opposite, actually) but that you end up with dozens of projects all with their own separate stacks and build environments, all with their own tedious onboarding processes (e.g. having one Angular project that absolutely requires Node 12, not Node 14, to run) while another project's server-side NodeJS code absolutely requires Node 16 and Python and Tomcat somewhere.
So I'm more than happy to pay the thousands of USD per year for my MSDN Subscription because it gives me a platform that saves me the trouble and headaches of a highly heterogenous environment especially given the fact we're a small shop.
100% this, the biggest issue I see with dotnet and Swift is that they're spending too much time trying to be appealing to people who don't want to use them. Swift, as a language, really only makes sense to use if you're extensively targeting Apple systems and planning to skip Windows/Linux altogether. That's a pretty shit deal, from the perspective of developers who want to deliver software to the largest possible audience. Similarly, writing an entire program in dotnet used to be a death sentence until Mono finally got thrown together. Even still it's not a very attractive framework for most cases, which just goes to show how important open governance can be when developing such a complex system.
That is a risk that is common to every single industry, and as such is a risk that is easily understood and quantifiable. We live in an interdependent world. You're always going to be dependent on suppliers, vendors, equipment etc. We have seen how covid related supply chain issues have affected everyone. Atleast with a S/W platform, what you have in-hand continues to work, and you can continue to use the compiler, libraries, etc to churn out new binaries.
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...
All I said was that it's cool but I can't see the latest commit status (the result of your CI pipeline) any more, and that I sent that feedback through the official channels as it were. I think I tacked a less favourable comment on the end and that was also answered.
First reply to my HN comment was from Nat, acknowledging it.
That was cool. Also, solid leadership.
I’m still personally waiting on “leveraging the vast resources of Microsoft will have the greatest likelihood of affecting public policy” regarding ICE.
That was 2019. It’s almost like he didn’t actually intend on doing anything about it.
Nat is an incredible person. I’ve been lucky to get to know him over the past couple months. Not only is he super chill, but he’s also not afraid to ask basic questions. Many of you might roll your eyes at that, but it’s a real problem: when you’re organizing something, you feel pressured to know everything, or else you’ll lose people’s confidence. So all the people who try to act confident also rarely ask basic questions.
Hackers are the opposite. We’re always focused on breaking down problems into the most basic components, and then building up complexity once we understand the system.
When Nat reached out to me, I didn’t know what to expect. But I certainly didn’t expect him to be a fellow hacker that happened to be famous. I think it’s incredible that someone can go so long without losing that spirit — imagine suddenly having a boatload of money. Most of us would probably take things easier.
Another surprise is how incredibly chill he is. When things go seriously wrong, he’s totally cool about it, in a way that’s hard to put into words. I learned the phrase “No stress, friend” from him, and I’ve used it a few times to soothe other people. As cliche as it sounds, sometimes it’s the one thing in the world you need to hear.
I wish I could tell a certain story to underscore the point, but Nat’s stories are his to tell. I hope he writes a book someday — nothing fancy, just a raw thought stream of all his experiences.
And I wish I could share his future ambition. It’s so exciting that I can hardly contain myself. It might not work out, but that’s true of everything.
I don’t know if anyone will see this. But I just wanted to write a little note to say how rare Nat is. He actually cares — deeply — and also cares about you. Most leaders don’t.
If someone reading this has the opportunity to work with him on his new project, I encourage you to leave your cushy job on that basis alone. It’ll be fun in a way you won’t experience elsewhere.
That's the worrying thing - how will Github be 5 years from now without Nat at the helm.
You got a real opinion. The fact it offended you shows that at least.
Maybe he could have communicated things better? I don't know which remarks specifically you're referring to. But "undiplomatic" is not a bad thing IMHO (within bounds of reason).
Here’s the internal msft email
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29098640
This person at MSFT who got promoted is the one that caused the problems in the dotnet community where features that had a go-live RTM license (as in merged and ready for long term support) were removed from the programming language so that more Microsoft Visual Studio licenses could be sold.
Other items under this persons remit:
- Visual Studio
- .NET
- Python
- TypeScript
- OpenJDK
- GitHub (+NPM)
- (hint hint) Azure SDKs (hint hint)
- (hint hint) Azure PaaS / Azure Serverless (hint hint)
Don't forget https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/pull/22262
Mind you this is first restart of Visual Studio in however many days had passed since the last update. Hence "cold boot time" is largely irrelevant to me.
I value VS for reasons other than "cold boot time". IntelliSense and debugging features weigh way more in my decision to keep VS as my main development tool for C++.
All my C++ servers are multiplatform: Linux/Windows. Usually I develop and debug on Windows and deploy on Linux. Deployment on Linux is handled by simple script that pulls from repo, builds and runs tests. However if needed VS can deploy, compile and debug straight on remote Linux server. I use this feature sometimes.
Hot reloading could be a better metric maybe ?
When I learnt to debug remote code from my Visual Studio, I was blown away. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/remot...
I have it running for weeks sometimes. My development desktop has 128GB RAM so VS just stays there. I frankly do not care about hot/cold reload time of this IDE at all even though it is very fast in my case.
>"When I learnt to debug remote code from my Visual Studio, I was blown away."
You should try VS 2022 preview. All you need is SSH access on remote comp. You do not have to deploy anything to target. VS does everything it needs
Feel free to be more candid...
It's about as "free" as Internet Explorer.
Or what am I missing here..
- "We have at the time of writing, 5 core developers who contribute part time to the development of CPython: Brett Cannon, Steve Dower, Guido van Rossum, Eric Snow, and Barry Warsaw"
- "also employs several core contributors and maintainers of key open-source projects in the Python ecosystem, including pandas, Dask, Jupyter, nteract, scikit-learn and Apache Arrow"
- "$150K financial sponsorship of the PSF"
- "long-time sponsors of PyCon US, having been the top-tier Keystone sponsors of the event for four years and continuing" (and other conferences too)
“Microsoft doing shitty/shady things is nothing new, especially here, but seeing as they've recently started advocating for open-source, this seems like quite a step backwards. Some background first. Microsoft has been working on an open-source Python type checker called pyright for some time now. The first public commit dates back to 2019-03-11. It seems quite promising, though I haven't tried it myself yet, with them advertising "speed" as its main characteristic. All fine and good so far. Then, in October of this year, they released PyLance, a VS code extension that serves as a language server for Python and uses pyright for type checking. PyLance is not open-source”
Of course his corporate persona is a bit different, but his work is still inspiring. Best of luck with your next adventure Nat! Cheers.
I still have some printed cards where I copied his idea to print 'Your_Name would like to apologize most abjectly for his behavior on the evening of ___________'
If there were any retention contracts that came with GitHub acquisition, that probably didn't apply to him.
The initial conversation was about how Nat was likely leaving because his contract ran out. The counterpoint was that he was from the Microsoft side and therefore he didn't have a retention contract. I brought up Xamarin because he was likely under a retention contract from that acquisition.
That being said, these contracts probably had little to no effect on his decision though, as I'm sure he would have made more money than he could spend in a lifetime regardless of whether he had stayed or not.
I do not see any indication about that being bound to a contract. They are also promoting the chief product officer which indicates that he did so far a good job. Which means, we can expect that they continue like they have done in the last year.
So exactly what GitHub tried to do before the acquisition?
Will be interesting to see what his next plans are.
GitHub really amped it up and not only brought out useful features from around 2018 on, it also started fixing some (not all) of the most annoying long-term gripes users and maintainers have had.
Couple that with adding more abilities to free accounts, and they seem to have all the momentum for dev tooling right now.
I just hope they don't get complacent, or target the enterprise stuff too much.
At Notion we use Actions to build our iOS and Android nightly apps and deploy our client and server releases to production.
It also happened M$ promoted [1] a new president of the MSFT DevDiv, which includes GitHub.
It happened on the same day, I mean I cant help to read a lot into it.
- That one time when Nat spoke against DMCA law and said taking down youtube-dl was wrong and he actively pushed for their reinstatement. [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1328365679473426432?l...
GitHub handled the situation really well, both in terms of the course of action it took, as well as setting up new procedures and a legal fund to prevent future incidents like this. Along with the EFF, they have actively promoted the right of developers (and FOSS) to tinker.
I think people don't realise how impactful youtube-dl going the wrong way could be.
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-0...
[1] https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1346517148357648385
Meanwhile similar repos get DMCA banned daily, like when Google demanded they remove all repos using a public widevine decryption key: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-0...
Microsoft is a member of the RIAA so don't expect to see real defense of any repos unless there is major bad press.
That being the case, the only thing that distinguishes private repos in this context is a thin policy that can be changed at a whim (and perhaps without any announcement).
Also, one of the reasons I put my code on a host like GitHub is so that I can share it/show it off*. So using a private repo to avoid Copliot defeats some of the purpose of me using GitHub in the first place.
*To the extent anyone else cares, at least ;)
Outside of that, I see copilot like the future of search engines. Instead of searching for plain text matches, it lets you search for abstract and complicated patterns. The killer feature for me would be seeing for a given suggestion (or search result), where the suggestion was derived from, linking back to the code snippet in GitHub.
[0] https://github.blog/2019-10-09-github-and-us-government-deve...
Also, immigration control in itself isn't a bad thing. You shouldn't be asking that people stop providing services to a goverment agency. You should demand the goverment agency stops being a bunch of dicks.
[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/29/17517870/i...
Screw the people who still spread MS FUD. I cannot think of any other company, certainly not FB/Goog (Amzn has nothing in this space and no interest outside paid AWS services) that would've done anything close to what MS have done.
Everything is better, tons of things are now free, integration has improved, there's full transparency. It helps that MS's own tools like VSCode, VS online etc are best in class by some margin and used by everyone.
I’m rolling my eyes hard at your claim of VS Code as best in class. If the category is JS-powered code editors then I’ll surely give them that title. However BS Code has many flaws compared to other IDEs. One being that it’s restricted in performance by the language it’s written in. I don’t use those products so I must not be apart of everyone?
When is the last time Microsoft "EEE"-ed anything? The most recent examples are 20 years old.
And look, you should never trust $bigcorp blindly, that would be naïve, but people have these 20-year old grievances that have little bearing on the situation today.
Teams is just a run-of-the-mill chat thingy, no? Was is ever open in any way or built on standards? What did they "embrace" or "extend"?
Surely they screwed up the massive lead in the space that Skype had, but I can't say they "EEE"'d it. It was just badly run.
Then when someone calls that out, they shouldn't comment if they don't work with Javascript?
Which one is it, best in class JS editor (which yepthatsreality actually agreed to), or best in class IDE (but only people who work on JS can comment on that...)?
There is never "Just Best". Its always very much subjective. And speed is not always everything, as long as it is fast enough. And for example.. For me, my use case, emacs is best. It can do anything. It is best as Swiss Army knife, because it can do anything. JS IDE? Sure here. Clojure? Here you go boss. Haskell? Hell yeah. Especially, since introduction of LSP stuff (Emacs LSP and Eglot). Simultaneously it can do IRC, note taking, literate programming, statistics, and much more, like remote editing with TRAMP. So in that case, it is best.
But is it best as just Java IDE? Absolutely not.
(nascent) HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29095759
Reason for changing: probably the most important exception to HN's title rule ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.") is in the case of corporate press releases, whose bland titles are usually a kind of misdirection (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Reason for reverting: on reflection I think the title is more Nat's voice than corporate PR, and I'd rather respect that.
That confusion alone speaks books on how well Microsoft integrated Github under his tenure. Kudos.
Stack Exchange, GitHub and Wikipedia, God bless them.
I must be missing something. For whatever reason GH Actions just never appealed to me. Am I missing something? I've used Drone IO more, granted it's better than travis but the #1 CI services seems like a stretch.
Gitlab has a similar YAML system from more than a decade, it's low friction, pretty polished and highly reliable. But it will always be a more niche product by the effect of Gitlab being way smaller that Github.
When you say "seems like a stretch", I read it as you thinking he meant "quality, as a matter of opinion".
I would not be surprised if it's #1 in usage, getting there by being integrated in github and free and actually pretty darn good.
The quantity aspect is also a bit surprising since it hasn't been that long that it's been released, so seeing a #1 leader is impressive in itself, even if it's free and integrated.
I mean I have a bunch of TravisCI projects that I really don't want to migrate over unless I have a good reason. The "if it works" leave it alone.
If there's enough motivation for people to switch it's impressive (or it shows how much people hate travis/jenkins/whatever CI they ARE using)
E: Pointing out proven, explicitly-defined-in-internal-emails tactics used by Microsoft always seems to get downvoted on HN. Why? Would someone like to start a conversation?
Pointing out stuff from decades ago doesn’t really count as still proven tactics.
Though of course all major companies do behave and do things like EEE in different ways.
All build tools that MS doesn't control. Their strategy has always been to try lock developers into their ecosystem so that only their ecosystem has all the software people want.
> Which things do you think they extended?
Acquiring and extending both Xamarin and Github. Atom editor is basically dead, MS/Github created an AI tool that presumably uses data they got from Github, they tried to remove features from free .NET tools, etc...
How long until they try to apply some more blatant vendor lock-in techniques with Github, .NET/Mono or maybe Azure?
Nat founded Xamarin which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Github was acquired in 2018 and Nat was already an Microsoft employee at time.
So Nat departing now is actually 5 years post the Xamarin acquisition (when he joined Microsoft).
https://www.linkedin.com/in/natfriedman/
EDIT: what's also interesting is that Thomas Dohmke joined Microsoft in 2015, moved to the Github division around the time of the acquisition (2018) but only became CPO 4 months ago.
I know he travels most of the time now and I’m wondering if this is a reflection of wanting to spend more time doing that or if there’s some other new project he’s moving on to.
> That’s why I’m moving on to my next adventure: to support, advise, and invest in the founders and developers who are creating the future with technology and tackling some of the biggest opportunities of our day.
And then loose everything if the supreme being puts you on a blacklist just because it stopped liking your government.
from bash man page
> _ At shell startup, set to the pathname used to invoke the shell or shell script being executed as passed in the environment or argument list. Subse‐
> quently, expands to the last argument to the previous simple command executed in the foreground, after expansion. Also set to the full pathname used
> to invoke each command executed and placed in the environment exported to that command. When checking mail, this parameter holds the name of the
> mail file currently being checked.
In CI-land, though, I think GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines fates are much more closely intertwined. The Microsoft-hosted runners for Azure Pipelines have the same environment as GitHub Actions (or perhaps it's GitHub Actions that's standing on the shoulders of Azure Pipelines)[1].
1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agen...
AWS has this as well
That being said I didn't notice anything particularly offensive about this letter. He describes the accomplishments under his watch, expresses gratitude for employees, and expresses confidence in his successor.
I dont think it is this letter in particular. So may be it is not fair to criticise it. But my guess is that the accumulation of these cooperate speaks, PR, and the past 10 years of main stream media riding along these PR to new height, just happen to tricker OP this time around.
And it doesn't seems to be an American things either, I read a lot of Fortune 500 post, somehow these over the top PR speak are mostly related to tech only.
However, I still think Github and Nat deserve a lot of praise for what they have done. Lots of changes and improvement happened after the acquisition. And not only credit to Nat but also to Microsoft.
I'd rather listen to someone who is straightforward than Sundar Pichai speaking entirely in corporate-speak while saying absolutely nothing of value or substance. Completely uninspiring.
All corporate speak is rather an invention of the 80's and 90's. Listen to corporate leaders from any other time before that.
that question mark at the end of a non-question. Nothing personal, just critique on a larger trend, but IMO upspeak and vocal fry are more annoying than corporate speak.
But I agree about these exit letter being more delicate. The more intimate notes are fine internally.
Being authentic as a leader is impossible. Your thoughts, desires, core beliefs, etc are going to be offensive to someone -- even if those disagreeable things made agreeable outcomes for people mad at your words. I mean offensive in the broadest possible definition here; more plainly, they'll be perceived negatively by someone with enough motivation to be nasty and often it's not worth the trouble of dealing with someone who woke up feeling nasty. We live in a world where people think it's okay to read into the words (and lives) of others, try to derive deep meaning out of simple actions (even if there is none), and where people believe you're lying by default (as a leader). The fact is, as time has gone on confirmation of these things in various people and businesses builds, so they're hard assuations to just toss aside. Therefore, it is most safe to type a paragraph giving direction, listing accomplishments, and thanking entities that helped you along the way in the most taste-free way one can, while saying absolutely nothing at all.
I offer a contrary point of view: why does it bother you so much? Simply do not read it.
Why not just tell it like it is then? Dear shareholders, I'm leaving because I'm rich / bored with Github and not because there was a falling-out.
>why does it bother you so much? Simply do not read it.
So you're suggesting people should just not read or listen to anything that they don't like? And just keep quiet?
It belongs to Microsoft, doesn't it?
In part because even the title is clickbait. Even the tl;dr manages to inject some platitudes before getting to the point.
-
And you're arguing a strawman. The comment you replied to never implied he shouldn't say farewell. They're complaining about how utterly insincere it comes across being blasted full of every trite corporate saying in existence
If anything they're arguing for more of a farewell than this, and it would have taken less effort too.
I wonder why it upsets you that someone would complain about this though, do you have a personal attachment to Nat?
We're confident that intelligent audience members, like yourself OP, can appreciate the large amounts of money and diverse political sensitivities that our communication must be careful to navigate. And while we respectfully regret any discomfort you might have experienced, we hope that you find joy in our future communications.
...which was riddled with phrases like:
"With all that we’ve accomplished in mind, and more than five great years at Microsoft under my belt, I’ve decided it’s time for me to go back to my startup roots. What drives me is enabling builders to create the future.
Not even Clark Kent could be this braggadocios.
The world is starting to realize that tech companies are causing a lot of societal damage that will take years, if not generations to repair.
People are also starting to get upset at large corporations for being tone death and having zero social contracts for the societies they reside in.
Public opinion is turning and GitHub/Microsoft are just getting caught in the crosshairs with public sentiment.
"plastic, formulaic, always-be-selling"
Huh?
-Phat Nat
As I live longer, I realize some people take to corporate speak and corporate values like ducks to water.
It's actually their preferred mode of communication and existence.
Politicians play this game most clearly - they need to communicate allegiance to the rich, their political party and 'the people', which is an impossible ask (because the parties are not aligned and you please one by taking away from the other) but they do quite well by having invented a vocabulary that's interpreted differently by each group, plus they can outright lie, which's a last resort move they try to avoid.
Anyhoo :)
It will be interesting to see if they can keep that up. It is clearly an advantage to have an organization that can think "developers first" and not Azure, Windows, or whatever first.
GitHub is hardly at arms length from MS.
Gack, what a terrible company.
That doesn't make it good or bad, but HN itself changes the ranking of an article based on the upvotes/comments ratio...