
Github For Everything - hunvreus
http://wiredcraft.com/posts/2013/09/18/github-for-everything.html
======
davexunit
I think depending upon a single, proprietary web service for everything is
foolish. When Github is down, you're out of luck. If Github changes in a way
you don't like, you're out of luck.

~~~
rohamg
Welcome to the internet! You must be new here :)

Jokes aside, using any proprietary web service has the exact same downside.
And yet here we all are using Google Apps, Dropbox, GitHub, HipChat, Intercom,
and dozens of others. As a team, we found additional web services add
exponentially increasing complexity; we eventually needed a platform to keep
track of all the platforms we were using. So we back-tracked and went the same
route as the Wiredcraft guys, centralizing everything into GitHub.

As a community, instead of advocating turning the clock back (which will never
happen: the toothpaste has exited the tube), we should explore ways to satisfy
security & reliability concerns while maintaining convenience. Also, you can
self-host GitHub.

~~~
davexunit
Yes, you are correct that using any proprietary web service has the same
downsides, which is why I have taken it upon myself to avoid as many of them
as possible and support free, decentralized alternatives.

I do use github to host my source code currently, but it would be trivial for
me to move to a free service such as gitorious, or a gitlab instance, or my
own server running cgit or gitweb.

What do you mean you can self-host GitHub? GitHub is not free software.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
Using free software has its downsides as well. Like, bugs all over the place
that require you to dig into the source code even just to understand what went
wrong. Also, glacier-slow updates, since everyone has a day job.

~~~
davexunit
That is an inaccurate generalization of free software. Also, free software has
the most important advantage off all: giving you freedom.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
How many times have you had a game-breaking bug? Why are a good amount of
folks still on .NET then? That last point is just hollow. Freedom from what?
Oppression?

~~~
idProQuo
In an actively maintained project, that bug could be fixed in a day (or at
least within the week). In an actively maintained proprietary game, it could
go out in a patch pretty quickly. In an abandoned proprietary game, the bug
will never be patched. In an abandoned open source game, there's at least a
chance you might be able to fix the bug yourself.

And that's one part of the freedom. Open source software will live as long as
people are interested in it, while proprietary software dies very
definitively.

------
dkuebric
This isn't what I thought it would be. I think "Github for everything" is
something everyone should be looking for in their lives. Version control is
useful for so many things.

I think the understand this already though. With the release of stuff like 3d
diffs now it's the "GitHub of CAD", I could imagine a useful future for the
"GitHub of legal documents", "GitHub of _____"....

~~~
__--__
While I appreciate the sentiment that version control is very useful, I'm
loathe to put all of my data in the hands of a US based company again. Went
down that road once with Google. Never again. I think "Git for everything"
should be the mantra, but I realize the unix philosophy behind git probably
makes that unlikely.

I think it would be cool to set up a 'github' 'p2p protocol' where if you sign
up with one server you can access projects from any other server following the
protocol. For example, I run my own 'github' instance just for me on my
personal server. A company can host an instance on their servers and, if they
implement the protocol, I can use my instance to submit a pull request on a
repository they host. Complete interoperability.

~~~
drdaeman
> I think it would be cool to set up a 'github' 'p2p protocol'

I believe that one is called Git, with HTTP or SSH and SMTP as helper
transports.

(In particular, pull requests are done with `git format-patch` and `git send-
email`)

~~~
__--__
Very good to know, thanks. But I did say 'github' and not 'git'. A lot of the
important parts of what makes github so nice to use aren't supported in the
standard git protocols. Issue tracking (which icebraining mentioned),
search/browse/other discoverable features and the social elements, to name a
few.

~~~
saraid216
So what you really want is a torrent tracker?

------
6cxs2hd6
Although maybe this blog post was already in the pipeline, unfortunate
juxtaposition with yesterday's GitHub outage.

Although I truly do love GitHub, it's not unconditional love. My love's uptime
closely tracks GitHub's.

~~~
fuckyoutoo
Your wife wishes github was more reliable.

~~~
kyzyl
Protip: In almost no circumstances is it a good idea to make comments about
someone's spouse. Much less on a professional forum, and certainly not on HN.
Regardless of the intent, the potential for misunderstandings, over reactions,
and incorrect inferences is great, meanwhile such comments almost _never_ add
any meaning to the discussion.

~~~
VikingCoder
Protip: A user with an account name, "fuckyoutoo" does not care about protips.

~~~
kyzyl
Yeh. I guess usually when I'm on HN I just respond to people as if they're
real, have a brain and not intentionally trying to stir shit up. In this case
I didn't even notice the name.

Alas, perhaps times have changed around here and I need to start treating
people like redditors until proven innocent ;-)

------
breckinloggins
Idea: Github should allow "plugin repositories" that can be shared or private.

The first iteration would have some way to provide file type viewers. A file
under filetype/viewer.js.js would replace github's default JavaScript viewer
(itself simply published as a repository that just happens to be the top
node). You could start your own customizations by forking that repository. If
you develop a viewer/editor/ _future plugin component_ that you think the
world should use, send it in as a pull request to the canonical repo.

The other thing I think github should do is go the JetBrains Upstream / Google
Grok (if it ever happens) route and provide syntactic / semantic analysis as a
service, from which all these visualizers, editors, and other tools are built.

------
kassner
It great, but I concern about exporting data out from GitHub for whatever a
reason. Is there a backup anything or we just have to dig data out from API?

~~~
hunvreus
Issues are disposable data, it has an expiration date. Once you closed an
issue, there's little value in it. Most of the valuable data ends up in the
Wiki (or in code), and Wikis are actually Git repositories. You can't make it
easier to backup.

Wanna try it? Take any repository, for example Hubot:
[https://github.com/github/hubot](https://github.com/github/hubot). Now go
ahead and run:

git clone
[https://github.com/github/hubot.wiki.git](https://github.com/github/hubot.wiki.git)

~~~
kassner
Issues are an important part of a product/library that is evolving. If you
loose an edge case bug, you could take months to face it again.

------
vincentkriek
Although it's nice that everything is in one place I don't think Github would
be my first choice. It's made primarily for managing code and everything
surrounding that. I do think the issue tracking translates very well over to
"real life" issues.

Why are the legal documents not on GitHub though? That would be perfect for
github.

~~~
hunvreus
We've actually stored legal documents on Github in the past (think contracts,
proposals, employee handbook, invoices...) as Markdown files. It felt very
strange though to collaborate around files through Git. The `PULL > COMMIT >
PUSH` workflow works well for a lot of things, not necessarily well when
you're preparing a contract.

We've actually built a tool around Dropbox for that very use case. Happy to
share it here when it's ready end of this month.

~~~
gcv
You made your non-tech staff write Markdown files? How did that go? Also,
about contracts — .doc/.docx is lingua franca. How did you deal with
collaborating with the rest of the world?

~~~
hunvreus
1\. We wrote a WYSIWYG for Markdown
([https://github.com/Wiredcraft/Moleskin](https://github.com/Wiredcraft/Moleskin)).
Also, everybody learns Markdown at Wiredcraft.

2\. Actually, the standard would be PDF for legal documents (never understood
why people send you a contract in a format that is easily editable). The tool
we're currently building allows you to use our WYSIWYG to collaboratively edit
documents online while keeping Markdown in the backend.

~~~
icebraining
_never understood why people send you a contract in a format that is easily
editable_

All formats are easily editable; contracts should be digitally signed to
prevent shenanigans.

------
abritishguy
Github goes down far too frequently to consider using the non-enterprise
version for everything.

The realtime collaboration on Google docs is also mega useful for weekly
meetings and something that Github's wikis doesn't match.

------
pearjuice
I'm still bracing myself for the Github for Writers;
[http://madebyloren.com/github-for-writers](http://madebyloren.com/github-for-
writers)

~~~
ideadude
I'm writing a book for O'Reilly and we use their Atlas tool which stores
everything in a git repository. Pretty cool, especially for technical books.

It's open to the public [oops, I lied. It's private beta] in beta:
[http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com/](http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com/)

------
mck-
This is exactly what we do at our team too -- we're developer centric and as
developers, we love using Github and Github issues (+ pull-requests) for
everything (including PM and HR)

One thing we do miss are certain features from Trello-like tools that give a
nice overview of your issues and facilitate PM, so we built a Chrome/FF
extension to fill in those gaps ([http://zenhub.io](http://zenhub.io))

Disclaimer: I work at Axiom Zen

~~~
dencold
One thing I wish Github would do is allow for a more granular permission
structure. It would be fantastic if we could allow people without github
accounts do things like submit issues, or allow certain users (e.g. non-
technical staff) only have access to the wiki and issue tracker.

Right now the permissions are centered around what you can do with
repositories, it's very developer-centric. I think there is a lot that GitHub
could do here to expand their service to be more applicable to an entire
organization.

------
topac
Everyone love and use wikipedia but i do not see 10k posts per day saying that
wikipedia is the new god.

~~~
solistice
You're just a couple of years late.

------
thefox
This idea is awesome. Thanks for sharing!

Are your internal wiki, recruitment process, Day-to-day operations, etc. on a
private repository? Do you have only one repository or do you have multiple
repositories for your internal work?

------
thomaslangston
I expect with a few custom front end UIs, even the poor fits could at least
use github as a backing store. This could give other company tools one data
layer to inspect.

------
fraserxv
Like this way of getting things done. Geeky! I may translate the post into
Chinese later.

