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Github People You Know

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35 pointsmtchavez7 comments

Silly question ahead: I feel like this is a SQL JOIN (and 10 lines of Ruby for the view) that any web developer could ship in an afternoon or so.

With the above in mind, I imagine Github would ship dozens of such little features a month; and yet they don't, and when they do it warrants a blog post about it.

What am I missing here? Can someone enlighten me?

Real systems at Github's scale take far more effort to add features to than your gut instinct first stab at imagining how it's done. There's caching to consider, instrumentation to build, privacy and security to consider, UI decisions to make, performance implications, documentation, tests to write, and deployment details to finalize. This could very well represent a week or two of work for a developer plus some ops work thrown in.

That's not all that much effort, but Github's staff has plenty more to do: maintenance on existing code, bugs to fix, research to do, troubleshooting, improving older code, updating code for new architectural improvements, writing internal features that don't show up in the public UI, and there's also the fact that every feature you turn on means an ongoing commitment to maintain that feature for the forseeable future.

User value and implementation effort are not correlated.

I'd turn the question on its head: why aren't you blogging about every little feature you've added?

True, this would be pretty quick to throw together, and I'm sure the GitHub guys do ship dozens of small features a month (less interesting ones perhaps?), but this one is fairly hidden - without this post I probably never would have found it.

I get that part of GitHub's pitch for longevity is the social aspect, but this feature confuses me. 90% of the time I get to a new repo, I'm there because it showed up in my feed when one of the people I follow starred it, or because I saw it on HN. If it looks sweet, I pass on the love by starring it, which then makes it show up in the feeds of folks who follow me.

I'm likely not the Typical GitHub User, but "who do I know that likes this repo", is a question I can't remember ever asking myself.

As an Atypical GitHub User, I ask the rest of you: what benefit should I be deriving from this page, that I'm currently missing out on?

I'm not sure that it really applies to me (since I'm not following anyone), but I could imagine it being useful if you only follow people you respect. If someone you respect is using a library, isn't that a strong endorsement or a vote of confidence?

Of course, starring a repository doesn't mean you're using it...

And you said you see this anyway in your feed...

But maybe it'd still be useful as a thread to pull on or if you missed that event in your feed.

If anything, it does seem to increase the "networkyness" of GitHub. I think I kind of like that.

Github is going to be the next facebook, or rather tumblr.

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