
Let's make GitHub better, together - experiment0
http://letsmake.github.com/bettertogether/#
======
facorreia
"Ruby came from Japan. Lua came from Brazil. Python came from the
Netherlands."

And all of them use English terms for language identifiers.

English is the lingua franca of IT & software development. As a Brazilian I
can tell you that programmers that don't learn at least how to read technical
English won't become good practicioners.

And GitHub is a social platform for collaborating on projects. In the vast
majority of projects, English is the common language spoken by all
participants.

Learn English and get over it.

(I didn't read further into the article. I hope the other suggestions make
more sense.)

~~~
Svip
I disagree. My position is not that English is bad (English has some
advantages here and there, but it is hardly the best language I know), it is
very practical - and necessary - to learn if you want to work in IT. No doubt
about it.

However, confining ourselves to one language makes us all think the same way.
Research has proven time and time again, that learning other languages will
help us apply different ways to think about problems, because different
languages uses different grammar to convey the same meaning.

Effectively, if we continue to strive to eradicate localised IT and software
related words from non-English languages and replace them with English words
instead, language development will stagnate and all languages will eventually
become English. And that is not a positive prospect.

I don't need Github localised, but I would like to localise it for the purpose
of creating technical terms in my own language. I fear that most of the
localisation into Danish would simply be English words instead, despite the
fact that Danish _actually_ has words for 'push' and 'pull' (»puf« and »hal«,
respectively).

And English shouldn't be so cocky either, by its current usage, English is
slowly becoming less than a language and more of a tool. And with both foreign
and native speakers' continue abuse of the language, English will soon be
derived of all its beauty, for the purpose of minimising communication.

Are we really that lazy?

~~~
masklinn
> Are we really that lazy?

It has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with being able to
communicate. Would you learn all of japanese, chinese, russian, spanish,
german, french, italian, polish, swede and english in order to be able to
contribute to projects in these various languages? Unlikely.

We need a "babel fish", and currently that babel fish is simply "learn
english". At various places and times in history it's been french, chinese,
latin or greek. That is _not_ a problem, it's just how things go so that
people can talk with one another across countries and cultures, and work
together.

~~~
Svip
I apologise, I did not mean that people who were 'unwilling' to learn other
languages are lazy. It is hard to demand that everyone know every language, so
a lingua franca (English in this case) is all right.

What I meant to say is that languages are becoming more and more plain. It
seems people - and sometimes with language institutions with them - are
accepting that the languages should be less complicated, so we can say the
same thing with fewer words.

An obvious example is people writing 'u' instead of 'you', but is actually
even more obvious in other languages than English. For instance, I am not a
fan of people saying 'issues' in Danish, when we have the word
»problemstillinger«, simply because the English word 'issues' is shorter.
Should English use »arv« instead of 'inheritance' because it is shorter?

Languages' vocabularies shouldn't cherry-pick.

I do not oppose a lingua franca, I merely advocate keeping each language
separate.

~~~
mercurial
I can't really get behind you on this. What do you think of the word "niveau"
in Danish? Or "risalamande"? Would you advocate their removal? Languages did
not sprout fully-formed from the thigh of Jupiter, they evolved organically.

At the same time, I do understand where you are coming from. Having such a
large proportion of your population be fluent in English - and thus more
influenced by its culture, is potentially an issue for the Danish culture.

~~~
Svip
What you are referring to is history. Languages borrowing terms and lending
them out back then is nothing something I have a problem with.

Today, the Internet, globalisation, etc. have decreased the number of
languages in the world dramatically (last thing I heard is one language dies
every two weeks) and there are approximately ~7000 languages alive.

While I know that most of these languages that are dying are spoken by very
few (otherwise it wouldn't die). It is now more important than ever to keep
each language unique.

What was great before (loanwords and such) may actually be a problem now.

~~~
mercurial
First, as you say, these languages were spoken by very few people. I remember
reading not long ago, the obituary of a Scottish dialect spoken in a single
village. You can't really expect a language with such a small group of
speakers surviving the advent of the automobile and the radio for very long.
And these languages did not die by a thousand loanwords: the young folk didn't
learn them, and the old folk who could speak eventually died.

There is also another factor at play here. "Proper" languages (that is, not
dialects) have hundreds of years of written material behind them, and this is
critical to ensure a language's survival.

------
hoggle
I'm a native German speaker and this localization thing seems like a really
bad idea.

I can understand where the github folks are coming from but it really is a
thing not worth putting any effort into. I sympathize with the humanism but
programming and programmer communication should be mostly pragmatic.

The open source community is a global thing and English has won a long time
ago as the definitive choice for a global language. It seems like it's easy
enough to pick up for a lot of people all over the world.

In my opinion it works especially well for technical writing.

~~~
jlarocco
Actually, as far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with "official" GitHub.
It's some guy with the GitHub username "letsmake" using GitHub pages [1].

I really wish GitHub would start doing something about people using that
feature to make it look like they're part of (or speaking for) GitHub. It's
incredibly misleading some times.

[1] <http://pages.github.com/>

~~~
shabble
Sites that allow users [to have significant control over] personalised
subdomains are also problematic for things like NoScript and other
whitelisting tools. Since I have github.com permitted, all the subdomains
inherit that permission.

I'm not even sure what a good model/UI would be to selectively white/blacklist
subdomains.

~~~
alter8
That is a problem only because Github uses the root domain for its own pages.
They could rather use www.github.com.

To solve your case on NoScript, whitelist the full address
<https://github.com/> and that will keep http subdomains out.

------
zalew
I don't know if i18n is such a good idea here. I've thought about it on a
project I'm currently working on, and my conclusion is that sometimes you need
to make the audience interact in a common language (in most cases English). If
you i18n your UI, it may encourage your users to communicate in their native
tongue and it will be a mess.

> Documentation, you neglected necessity of open-source. [..] Nothing too
> fancy; just click a button, parse my repository, and provide a list of
> public classes and members.

uhm, Sphinx?

~~~
kmfrk
Yes and no - but your point is great in general. I think that there are cases
where we who are fluent in English just overestimate the English skills of
some people and countries.

While internationalization is not always preferable, as you point out, there
are times where it means making a service or tool accessible to people who
otherwise would not have access to it. We already know how dreadful the GitHub
interface can be to newbies, not to mention the English language itself.

GitHub is such an important tool to developers and entrepreneurs that we
should think very carefully about barring other people from using it
inadvertently.

Internationalization will have adverse effects, _definitely_ , but I still
think the discussion of whether making GitHub English-only is worth deterring
people who may not otherwise find their way into software development,
programming, and the like. Just think of the many other ways people are
starting to use GitHub.

But I for one dread the day I receive unsolicited Pull Requests in Russian for
an undiscovered 0day vulnerability. :)

~~~
tvdw
_Non-native English speaker here, I volunteer at several companies to
translate their interfaces._

Almost all people can read basic English (especially those who access Github),
so translating the Github interface seems rather pointless to me. Of course,
translating the support articles would really help accessibility for those who
don't know English as well as native speakers.

Translating interfaces makes people think they can use their language to
communicate on a site. Translating only the support articles helps people
understand the site, but they will quickly realize that the site itself
prefers English-only communication.

~~~
kmfrk
The bar to entry to newcomers is probably more of a UX/usability problem than
one of internationalization; that I agree with you on.

Translating the support docs is one suggestion I think is unequivocally good,
and something that should be done.

I think internationalization is great in a read-only capacity, but when non-
English speakers start posting Issues, comments and Pull Requests, that's
where it starts to turn into a problem.

GitHub has very little to translate in the first place, as it's very sparse on
prose, so aside from the question of support docs, we are probably making
mountain out of mole hills, since the remaining English is jargon and not
beholden to internationalization concerns.

------
thiderman
No localization, please. Sure, the languages mentioned came from countries
where english is not the main spoken language, but the languages themselves
are always in english, and so is everything relating to collaborative software
development.

If a user comes to a site that is using her primary language, she will
interact with that site using that language. That is very much not desirable
at a site like Github.

Other than that, the suggestions listed sound nice to me.

~~~
TeeWEE
+1

If you can't speak english, you can't program for sure. I work with some
people who are not very good english speakers. I can see it in their code.
Sometimes its a mix of english and their own language. Very bad. NO-HIRE

~~~
Adirael
Last year I worked as a freelancer for a company which sold physical stuff
over the Internet (ecommerce). All the code I inherited was procedural PHP
written with Swedish comments and variable names.

I speak three languages, Swedish is not one of them. That was an awful summer.

------
mbesto
Slightly meta -

If I was a business owner and a customer wrote something like this, I would be
absolutely ecstatic.

It shows that you've created an awesome product. So awesome that people want
more out of it, and are willing to spend considerable time ($$$) to help you
make it better.

This is the real reason profit margins are so important to a _good_ company.
It means you can re-invest back into the growth of your product and continue
to delight your customers.

Good on ya Github, keep it up.

------
purephase
A few items I'd like to see:

\- Attachments in the issue tracker. Pictures tell a thousand words and it
would be infinitely easier for user submitted issues to have screenshots.

\- Better code search.

\- More granularity in the notifications. For instance, I'd love the ability
to toggle email for my own repos but leave it to web notifications for my
watches. I've missed pull requests because of the deluge of messages.

\- Better reliability.

It's a great tool. I really enjoy using it, but with a few additions it would
be near perfect.

~~~
dewski
We just shipped Issue Attachments: <https://github.com/blog/1347-issue-
attachments>

------
pixxa
The #1 missing feature in github for our team is that we can't attach files
directly from Issues Web UI. Usually we need this for screenshots, but
sometimes data files, logs and other artifacts. Workarounds are aplenty but
all painful and problematic. See <https://github.com/thisduck/gh-attachment>
or [http://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/2012/06/attaching-files-to-
gith...](http://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/2012/06/attaching-files-to-github-
issues.html) not to mention countless internal homegrown hacks that exist out
there.

This lack of attachments makes it a lot harder for non-techies to use Issues
(e.g., for casual or QA testing). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE the
minimalist approach of Issues, and it is definitely _almost_ good enough
feature set, but this one missing feature makes it difficult for one to
imagine the use of issues at-large in broad organizations--an undiscovered
area of growth for github.

I would definitely add this to the "I <heart> github, but..." list.

P.S., experiment0, great execution of a "feature request".

~~~
pixxa
My wish came true in less than one day! Check it out
<https://github.com/blog/1347-issue-attachments>

------
Tehnix
I don't know why, but for some reason I found that localizing github would in
fact not contribute to the better, but to the worse. I know there are a lot of
programmers for whom english is not their native language (heck, I'm one of
them), but as almost all programming languages are in english, I think it
would make sense to keep github in english. My reasons are, more of less, the
following:

\- As it stands now, the majority of repositories are in english. If github
were localized, it would most likely contribute to more non-english repos
since the author would be less inclined to give it any thought.

\- It would require a lot of extra effort on githubs side to, first of all
localize it, but also to keep it updated and correct. They would need
translators and probably also need to put a lot of effort into localizing the
site (which I'd rather they focused on other things).

I know these may not be the best reasons, but I'd rather people learned
english than doing it in their native language (english opens it op to more
people, ie more people can benefit/contribute to the project).

But hey, those are just my two cents...

------
themgt
What if we spent our time making GitLab (<http://gitlabhq.com/>) better
instead, since it's open source and users can host their own for free?

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
One of the biggest draws of Github (to me) is that it's one central place for
me to go for a wide array of projects that I work with, and where a lot of
people I know can host their code to share with the large community of
developers already on Github.

By using Gitlab on your own hosting, you lose all of that convenience of
having everything in one place. Imagine that every time you want to contribute
to a project, you have recreate yet another user account, upload all of your
SSH keys again, and more. And then further imagine that you want to fork and
work on repos from multiple projects that all have their own Gitlab instances,
and now checking on your projects requires visiting N different sites to get
the same information that you already get from a single login to Github.

Now I'm just as big of a fan of open source as the next person, but having a
single central place to visit for projects is a Good Thing, and IMO Github has
proven time and again that they actually _care_ about the open source
community as much as we do, and have done so much to foster communication and
interaction between developers that their contributions are far more important
to me than the value of having my code repositories hosted on an open source
platform.

~~~
themgt
I agree, and I think GitHub is a fantastic resource for open-source projects,
but it's a bit of a lobster trap in the sense that its existence lessons the
need for an open-source alternative, but then locks you in to a paid model
once you need private repositories.

What we should be looking for is an open-source project that allows people to
keep their own projects private on their existing hosting, and allows easy
sync with github for public projects.

------
pbiggar
I slightly agree about CLAs. Contributor Licence Agreements are largely
ignored by most small open source projects because they're a pain in the ass
and prevent contributors from contributing.

However, I think they could go further than the support discussed here. It
would be great to see CLAs tht you could get asked to sign when you make a
pull request. You could also make it easy to sign - maybe instead of printing
and scanning, you could sign using a PGP key.

If Github incorporated this stuff, every project could seamlessly use CLAs.

~~~
apaprocki
Paperlex has a public free CLA manager which integrates with GitHub:
<http://clam.paperlex.com/>

~~~
pbiggar
I took a quick tour, and I believe this would be too cumbersome compared to an
integrated solution.

------
gavanwoolery
The famous "hacker faq" recommends using English for a few reasons:

<http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4>

Other than that...

Since code is shared across many different countries, we cannot be too wishy-
washy about which one to use. English is rated as "the most influential
language in the world" in terms of how many countries use it and the socio-
economic standing of these countries. I hate to be the one to push English (as
a native speaker myself), but as you can see others on this thread recommend
it, even though it is not their native tongue. By all means, I do not promote
destroying cultures, but learning a common language brings us all closer
together. :)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I like the sentiment, but might I point out that the early inventors of
television believed that it might end war by showing the great similarities
between peoples and nations.

And that from domestic violence to wars, we tend to fight those who are next-
door, closest to us in mind body and spirit.

(If you are not too sure about that, think how easily a rural Shinto Chinese
would be able to explain the vast differences between Christianity and Islam)

~~~
alxndr
Shinto Chinese?

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Yeah that was dumb of me. I may have been thinking Shenism, but I am sure
there are some Shinto Chinese.

Anyway the point I am making still holds I think - you can barely squeeze a
credit card between Islam and Christianity if viewed from a distance - yet
billions are on the edge because of the "vast gulf" between the religious

------
wladimir
Hmm my suggestions:

\- Please make the "show changes" scale to large code changes.

I've been bitten by hanging browsers a few times while trying to review pull
requests in which many files were changed significantly or added. One (simple)
way would be to show just the changed files, in collapsed form, which can be
expanded.

\- Add a way to increase the size of the diff context

Sometimes the given context is not large enough, especially if a file has many
similar functions. For example in vimdiff you can "expand the hidden lines" in
this case.

~~~
jakub_g
@wladimir Have a look at the Firefox userscript I wrote very recently:
<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/153049> \-- feedback welcome! Of course
it doesn't eliminate the big initial fetch from the served, just collapses it
once loaded to have more friendly UI.

~~~
wladimir
Thanks for the link, looks useful.

That would be functionality that should be in Github itself. Good to see that
I'm not the only one with that pet peeve.

------
d0m
Would be nice to have a mega refactor function that could check for duplicate
all over the public repos. So, for instance, my "capitalize function" could be
tagged as duplicate and I could see multiple projects having a better one.

------
jelder
I appreciate this guy's effort, but honestly most of his concerns has ever
impacted my productivity. Sure, the editor isn't great yet. What I really want
to see, and I'm not the first to say this:

* Explicit licenses: If a repo lacks a LICENSE file, this is almost as annoying as it lacking a README, and GitHub's interface should complain to the repo owner. Searching and filtering by license would be nice, too.

* Explicitly "official" forks. It's way too hard to find the right fork when you just want to improve a public gem, for instance. I was there was an explicit "why does this fork exist" field on each repo. acts_as_solr is a particularly morbid example of why this is important.

* Their code search is basically useless. Last I checked, they don't even index branches. They should just buy or reimplement Ohloh.

~~~
boyter
Shameless plug, searchco.de allows you to search over github,

<http://searchco.de/?q=irq_create_mapping+url%3Agithub>

You just need to add the url:github portion to any search. No branch support
yet, but working on it. I doubt they will be able to buy Ohloh though as
that's owned by BlackDuck. I also find Ohloh search lacking in some areas such
as the following search,

<http://searchco.de/?q=%3D~+lang%3Aperl>
[http://code.ohloh.net/search?s=%3D~&browser=Default](http://code.ohloh.net/search?s=%3D~&browser=Default)

------
hmsimha
I thought it worth mentioning that everyone opposed to this idea is capable of
communicating in English. I am guilty of being monolingual, but if the most
popular online source code management community used a language X that I did
not know how to speak (especially if X was considered the lingua franca of
software development), it would be a huge barrier of entry to me. While I
would do well to learn X, an english localization of that platform would
greatly ease my transition and encourage me to communicate with the
predominantly-X speaking community. I would like to get the opinions on
localization of github from people who are currently unable to communicate in
English with a high enough proficiency to read these comments and voice their
position here.

------
niels
So apparently this is the new standard in job applications.

------
rsanheim
GitHub used to have localization, back before I joined, but it got dropped.
Many non-native speakers switched to English anyways, and it just wasn't worth
the effort and maintenance hassle.

------
why-el
I think localisation makes sense for the docs. Maybe we can branch off from
here and coordinate the efforts. I myself am ready to work on Arabic and would
love to have people join me.

~~~
nicholassmith
I agree, that's where the localisation should go. Github has many things and
for a first timer the docs are invaluable, but if you're a non-native speaker
having them in your own language is going to help you ramp up to speed on
using it that much quicker.

------
porker
Code search would also be useful, even if just string search. Or filename.
E.g. somewhere in this repository there's a file called mysettings.xml

[Yes, I know I could check it out, but still...]

~~~
simonw
Filename search is available for all repositories - hit "t" and start typing
your search query. It's fantastic.

A "search source code" box is available for my paid for private repos, so I
guess it's a premium feature.

~~~
porker
Thank you!

------
hunvreus
From what I remember, Github had localization going on but pulled the plug at
some point because it was too much of a clusterf __k.

I was surprised not to see any mention of the only thing that irks me: the
"Switch account context" dropdown menu being available only on the front page
and not in the top bar where your account is displayed. That would save me
quite a bit of gymnastic to have that displayed on all pages.

------
upinsmoke
Better search in Starred projects! I can rarely find a project I have starred.

------
Hawkee
While it may be an intentional shortcoming, I feel GitHub is lacking in
general discussion. Sometimes I just want to ask the developer a question
about their code. Usually what I do is look for their Twitter account and
@mention the question over to them. It would be nice to find a discussion
around a particular repo just as we have here on Hacker News.

------
freshhawk
Let's volunteer to work for a commercial entity for free?

No thanks. They're doing fine, they can easily afford to pay people to do this
if it's necessary. Volunteer your time for non-commercial projects that do not
have the option of paying people a fair wage for their work.

------
morefranco
This is a great personal effort to bring improvements to a platform we all
know and love - I've got many friends overseas who all speak (and most
critically - think ) in English to varying degrees.

Localization is never a wasted effort.

I hope they hire you Garen!

------
moe
The first thing I do when I come across a site that tries to speak my
language? I switch it back to english.

Localization makes sense when you're a shopping site aiming at mom & dad and
non-techies.

For technical services (pretty much all SaaS) the translations usually turn
out so terrible that everyone turns them off. Also good luck googling for the
solution to a problem in any other than the primary language of the site...

------
mpeg
I know this is a call for help, but I find it funny that their big screenshot
in spanish makes no sense to this native speaker.

------
webology
I'd love to see a "grouped" pull request option. Something that would let me
say show me changes from repo1 + repo2 because they depend on each other.
Think refactoring code into a smaller repo, etc. I deal with this quite a bit
with clients as they grow from small apps into much more complex apps with
lots of inner dependencies and tests.

~~~
sdesol
We (my company) actually take this to another level. We provide branch level
grouping.

[http://6b507fb6377c7b2ce0ed-f6f6a52addfcf546a4b633fce1dd247e...](http://6b507fb6377c7b2ce0ed-f6f6a52addfcf546a4b633fce1dd247e.r94.cf1.rackcdn.com/search-
result.png)

The reason why we've created this feature was because in the enterprise world,
it is not uncommon to construct a release based on branches from various
repositories.

We also have a smart attributes technology that will allow you to assign
arbitrary meta data to a pull request. With this technology, you'll be able to
ask questions like show me all the pull requests that have a priority greater
than X.

------
reledi
Some good points, but I disagree with the following.

\- i18n and l10n

For reasons already stated by many others in this HN thread.

\- Notifications should be more like email

Please no. I'm already terrified of my email inbox. It's a mess, so many
messages. Sometimes I'll leave a message unread or mark it as unread if I want
to return to it later but instead it gets buried by newer messages. So now I
have a couple of hundred unread emails and I have no idea what they are but
they surely can't be important.

Keep notifications how they are. It makes using GitHub stress free. If I read
a notification, get rid of it so I never have to see it again. If it was so
important, I should remember it anyway or I would have set it as my highest
priority and worked on it right away.

\- Revamp Inline Editing

Themes? Multiple cursors? Command line? Live linting? ... No thanks, sounds
like feature-creep. I like the editor how it is, nice and simple. Want a full-
blown editor? Don't use the web interface.

\- Infinite newsfeed

There are reasons why many websites choose not to include infinite scrolling,
see [1] for some good reasons.

One thing I'd like to see added to GitHub:

\- View all public activity history

There's been many times when I want to look at my own history or someone
else's and I can't because it stops after the first page.

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Infinite-Scrolling/What-are-the-
downsid...](http://www.quora.com/Infinite-Scrolling/What-are-the-downsides-of-
using-automatic-scrolling-pagination)

------
zbowling
You should add the stuff I posted about last year about this time. Basically
my beef is forking being not very in the spirt of how it's supposed to work
with git. <http://zbowling.github.com/blog/2011/11/25/github/>

------
dmritard96
Doesn't chrome have translation capabilities? I don't know if the translation
capabilities can avoid translating code but if it could somehow (a do not
translate tag or something) then localization could be done, locally...

------
FiloSottile
Actually, more than labels (that would be good anyway) I would LOVE seeing the
open/closed state of issues in notifications. I spend a lot of time checking
new issues already closed by the other project maintainer.

------
FiloSottile
Issues images, headshot: <https://github.com/blog/1347-issue-attachments>

And don't tell me that you Githubbers don't lurk over here ;)

------
Adirael
"Bifurcar", that term may be correct, but it sounds awful to my ears.

~~~
rbonvall
It sounds weird indeed. The literal translation of branching would be
«ramificar», which also doesn't seem right. That's the problem: everyone comes
up with their own translations that are not what people refer to them in real
life.

I say «crear una rama» (create a branch), while most of my friends just say
«hacer un branch» (make a branch). And there are also the ugly anglicisms like
«branchear» and «forkear».

------
jakub_g
+1 for "likes" in issues.

~~~
orefalo
Another feature missing: per branch access control

~~~
tomeric
Yes! This would allow developers to set up premium branches: <http://premium-
branch.org>

------
fphilipe
Didn't GitHub have localization at some point in the past? If I remember
correctly, the footer had a world map background with links to other
languages.

~~~
tomeric
Yes they did: <https://github.com/blog/679-github-in-your-language>

------
NicoJuicy
Github shouldn't be localized...

Some projects wouldn't be viewed if it ain't in english, no one here almost
speaks Chinese do they? :-)

Facebook should be localized, not github.

~~~
alxndr
我会讲中文。

~~~
derleth
> 我会讲中文。

Google Translate renders this as "I can speak Chinese.", which speaks volumes
about how far it's come with East Asian languages.

------
neilmiddleton
Someone wants a job

------
prezjordan
I thought this was a GitHub promotion at first, but this is a genius form of
self-marketing. Very creative, and very convincing!

------
wildchild
I suggest read-only SSH keys for deployments.

------
louischatriot
Very interesting proposals overall, not too sure about the localization (don't
most programmers speak English ?) though.

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minikomi
I think i18n makes sense - for docs. For getting people up and running. For
explaining the benefits of github.

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digerata
Infinite scrolling? Yuck.

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wildchild
I think new pricing strategy could make github better.

~~~
benmanns
What would you suggest?

~~~
wildchild
First of all, it's too expensive. $7 for 5 repos? I'll use bitbucket instead
and keep github account for opensource projects. Probably price should depend
on a number of collaborators and some special features.

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juanbyrge
How do people have so much free time lol?

