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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

I think GitHub has generally been a really good thing for devs. It has added some good opinions on how we ought to work. Specifically I would say:

* Pull requests as a major dev artifact. Probably the most reliable tracker of a set of decisions at a point in time

* The connection of the issue tracker to the code base and not as a separate tool (ie Jira).

* Expectation of a basic README with the project with the basic documentation.

We take these things for granted now, but pre GitHub this was NOT the norm.

I’m not sure I frankly want a competitor here. It’s one extra annoying thing for me to think about. Opinions are good for streamlining my life as a dev.

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> basic README

GitHub (plus the wide adoption of the incredibly-limited Markdown) is the reason we no longer see a a README but a RENDERME. Have you tried to read most README.md files now? They’re filled with so many images and HTML that make it no longer readable without first rendering it (one example: how does an _image_ of CI status and other badges help me at all when I open the plaintext? In many cases, a definition list would be better, but Markdown doesn’t support it). The problem is then further exacerbated by ‘GitHub-flavored Markdown’, a syntax fork that now makes your Markdown incompatible with other forges; in the case of trying to shoehorn in admonition (feature lacking from Markdown) Microsoft GitHub is overloading the blockquote element via `>` ruining not just compatibility/portability but also HTML semantics as it’s still rendered inside a <blockquote> element.

The READMEs of yore were usually ASCII-only docs akin to old GameFAQs guides that didn’t require a render step. They lacked accessibility that HTML can provide, but aside sick ASCII art banners, didn’t have all that cruft that should be in the project’s landing page not README.

Yes GitHub contributed to advancing the software industry but now it's been acquired by Microsoft and good alternatives have emerged so time has come to move on.

Everything flows.

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