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Comment by selykg | Hacker News Reader

Before Microsoft bought them they were basically at a standstill and no new features were being added to the product. At least, that's my recollection of it, perhaps someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

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My screwdriver doesn’t seem to need more features. It’s nice stable and reliable.

Before the MS acquisition, Github didn't even have emoji reactions on comments in issue threads, so people just spammed +1s if they had the same issue. It was terrible. (You can still see evidence of this on older repos.) They also didn't have like 5 billion other features that we now take for granted.

EDIT: Sorry, this is incorrect. GH did ship them prior to the MS acquisition. I do however remember them taking an EXTREMELY long time to ship emoji reactions, which struck me as a fairly trivial feature. I stand by the point that GH ships features faster post-acquisition, though.

They had reactions two years prior as confirmed by their blog post[1] about it.

[1] https://github.blog/2016-03-10-add-reactions-to-pull-request...

Dang, you're right. Sorry about that.

I remembered that reactions irked me for some reason, but I had incorrectly tied it to the MS acquisition. The real issue was this: it took Github an extremely long amount of time to add a feature as simple as reactions. Github was founded in '08, and didn't add reactions for another eight years! But I distinctly remember once MS acquired them, they started shipping features left and right, and features much larger than simple emoji reactions.

Before this gets downvoted, are there any notable features that could only have been added thanks to the Microsoft acquisition?

I think GitHub actions are pretty successful, which may not have been developed by Microsoft as it was launched right after acquisition, but I guess it's easier to keep free since it runs on their own hardware.

I don't immediately see copilot as a GitHub feature, but maybe that'll change for better or worse.

I think you're asking a slightly incorrect question. Very few features could "only" be added thanks to the MS acquisition. What you really want to know is how many more features were added, thanks to MS. Or, how much longer would those features have taken to be built if GitHub was not acquired by MS. My gut feeling, seeing GH pre- and post-acquisition, says that a lot of the stuff they shipped post-MS would simply never have been shipped before.

Under MS, they shipped - just off the top of my head:

* dev containers

* vscode-github-in-the-browser

* github actions

* that extremely useful fuzzy-find that repos have (press t in any repo)

* copilot

I seriously doubt they could have shipped a single one of those things pre-MS.

> * that extremely useful fuzzy-find that repos have (press t in any repo)

They shipped that in 2011[1]

[1]: https://github.blog/2011-02-10-introducing-the-file-finder/

Fair, though I think it became a lot more useful and usable after the acquisition.

> * that extremely useful fuzzy-find that repos have (press t in any repo)

I didn't know this. Thanks for the tip!

GitHub Actions seems to use Azure a lot under the hood; given that they seemed to use AWS for older features (attachments, releases, etc.) it seems likely that it actually needed Microsoft.

My best guess, with no knowledge of what actually happened, is that it was derived from Azure Pipelines.

That's not true. Reactions on comments were implemented long before the acquisition. And people still did +1.

On the other hand, what they didn't have was search locked behind a login screen.

> Before the MS acquisition, Github didn't even have emoji reactions.

I have never, ever in my professional life thought “I need an emoji for this”

Modern impact drivers are pretty amazing if you have more than one screw to operate.

Yeah I don’t remember the last time I used a screw driver. Electric screw driver for tiny stuff (one of my fav tools of the last decade+) and a small impact driver for bigger screws.

Please create a PAT to enable your screwdriver.

The big one-step-forward-five-steps-back UI redesign was before the acquisition, wasn’t it?

Only now is GH redesigning the UI to be fluid-width everywhere.

And GitHub actions were basically sharing the infra of Azure Pipelines.

Agreed. I vaguely recall that there were no new features for more than a year.

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