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Comment by harel | Hacker News Reader

I think github got better after Microsoft bought them. They were in some stale rut for a long time before that.

Yep I agree. And unlike where lots of acquisitions die down after years even if they do ok initially, it's taken years but Github finally seems to be increasing the pace of innovation.

I'm curious here: what got better in GitHub since the acquisition?

It's a genuine question, I'm not being sarcastic, I really don't understand the statement (which seems to be shared by several people here). I honestly can't point out a single thing that was delivered that changed the game for like, 6 years from now if not more (copilot is a nice gadget IMHO but it's not really game changer, is it?).

I was actually hoping that MS support would change that, but I don't see it happening.

I have enjoyed using Actions. The GitHub integration into VSCode has been a huge productivity boon for me as well.

Do you mean VSCode’s standard git support, or is there a github plugin specifically? (Just curious if I’m missing out on something!)

There's a Github plugin. I am specifically referring to that. I use it to do code reviews. Being able to see the changes in-line in my editor helps give me a bit of context to the changes because it's easier to see the surrounding code, click into functions being used, etc.

Off the top of my head: Tree view in PRs, the new projects board, code search, Mermaid and maths in markdown, the cmd+k action bar thing, Copilot, the best VS Code themes, lots of small changes like Readme TOC, and so on.

Maybe these changes are incremental, maybe you don’t cherish them as much as I do ,and some were very much over due. Regardless, I like them and am impressed by Github’s recent work.

The app(!), the inline vscode INSIDE github (just press the . [dot] key when in the repo), actions, general interface, settings to name a few.

Github actions. Word on the street is that all DevOps personell moved to the GH actions team (which to me dosnt really sound reasonable btw) to bring it up to DevOps parity. Autopilot, those web based dev stations, mermaid integration ...

I agree, but this is a hot take among a lot of free software purists.

Yes that is true, but lucky for me, I'm not one. So I can clearly see how much better it become. I don't even understand why. I would have thought they were profitable before the acquisition (were they?) so why resources only started being applied afterwards?

I'm guessing that being part of a much larger company allows them to spend more time on UX and "the little big details" that might not directly contribute to profits.

Maybe Github Actions has brought in a lot more revenue, too. They get a "discount" on Azure hosting, I'm sure.

Not sure whether I'd be labeled a purist, but I've been stdlib only for a while now, and tend to choose the open choice over the left hand path of the corporate capitalist patriarchy, I wouldn't call myself outright biased though ( I kid. )

However, all jests aside, being a relatively open source person, I haven't seen much in the git product of Github getting any worse after Microsoft acquired them. The social aspect, well, it is what it is, and I don't care for it, but I don't necessarily think my preferences translate well to a quarterly earnings call.

I do personally perceive the downtime to be more frequent now, but maybe only because it's more publicized, I do not have any data to substantiate that personal observation.

The got better because they finally got to money to try to be competitive with GitLab. Before that they were really behind on features.

However their reliability is down the toilet. So a mixed bag, IMHO.

I'd say the opposite.

Reliability went way down after the acquisition.

It feels like we constantly have issues with github, it's becoming as bad as azure.

Actions, Packages and Projects (beta) are nice product ideas but they are a nightmare of DX experience.

You can see they rushed them out to compete with Gitlab.

Also dodgy stuff like Copilot.

I couldn't disagree more, GitHub has had significantly more outages - especially transient ones and is now focused on smashing out sales driven features rather stability and core functionality.

The "Internet" had significantly more outages recently, and a lot was to do with Cloudflare. Either way, in the grand scheme of things, an outage is a sliver of a percent of the time, while new features are (almost maybe probably) for ever.

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