
GitHub Public Roadmap - nicolas_
https://github.com/github/roadmap
======
danicgross
It’s one thing for a startup to do this while small.

A whole other level of evolution to do it while you’re large. Imagine Apple
suddenly publishing their roadmap. This type of organizational neurogenesis
done as an adult is impressive.

EDIT: I am in admiration of the change, regardless of opinion on the value of
public roadmaps. It’s just rare to see big companies make big changes. Sign of
youthful vitality and health, in my opinion.

~~~
ryanSrich
Can you explain why? I really don’t see the draw of public roadmaps. I buy a
product because it works for me now. If there are improvements I need in the
future the company either implements them or they don’t. A public roadmap
doesn’t improve my experience at all. In fact, I might be less likely to buy
the product.

This feels like it opens github up to the vocal minority to scream and yell
publicly about features they want. Some of which could negatively impact other
users. And github will have to succumb to the pressure of that minority.

~~~
Solstinox
The only vocal minority that counts in business is the minority writing the
biggest checks. They probably get access to roadmaps anyway.

~~~
ryanSrich
With Github I’m not so sure. The online mob usually gets what they want.
Having said that, the overlap between those paying the most for Github and
those demanding the most might be 100%.

------
jiripospisil
> Discussions live in your project repository, so they’re accessible where
> your community is already working together. Their threaded format makes it
> easy to start, respond to, and organize unstructured conversations.
> Questions can be marked as answered, so over time a community’s knowledge
> base grows naturally.

I can imagine "GitHub Discussions" [0] cutting off a significant number of
Stack Overflow questions.

[0]
[https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104](https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104)

~~~
rikroots
I really like the idea behind this feature. Being able to add a discussions
'forum' to my main project could be an excellent way to start building a
community around the project.

Looking at the Discussions issue page -
[https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104](https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104)
\- it looks like this will be delivered to projects not in the Beta testing
group sometime before Christmas?

Out of interest, are there any project admins around who can comment on how
easy it is to moderate the Discussions threads? My one concern would be
managing flame wars, and minimising inaccurate answers participants may offer
each other.

~~~
GordonS
I'm looking forward to GitHub Discussions too. As well as helping foster
community and contributers, it's also a clear separation from Issues, where I
often see non-dev and peripheral questions being asked.

------
oefrha
This is welcome, but anyone else feeling that GitHub is moving in the more-
stuff-lower-quality direction? In particular I've wasted quite a bit of time
over the past year on scarcely documented features and misfeatures around
GitHub Actions. (To be clear I like GitHub Actions a lot.)

One example: just yesterday I found out that public images on GitHub Packages
Docker registry can't be used in GitHub Actions' jobs.<job_id>.container,
since the former is gated by auth for whatever goddamn reason and the latter
can only pull from public registries. Think about it, their (probably #1)
container-related feature can't use their own registry. Apparently people have
been complaining for almost a year now, yet nothing has changed.

~~~
ianwalter
I think more-stuff-lower-quality is kind of inevitable, but I am happy with
that general direction. I have run into a lot of annoying things like and
including your example. This roadmap would be better if it had a simple way to
submit and vote for feature requests like other public roadmaps.

~~~
shankun
(From GitHub product team)

Thanks, @ianwalter. We plan on having a public feedback repo soon - but in the
meantime, if you want to submit ideas, please check out
[https://support.github.com/contact/feedback](https://support.github.com/contact/feedback).

------
codeviking
I love how well organized and executed this is.

I love that the issues each share a common format and provide concise yet
clear documentation. The concise bit here is key -- I've had trouble perusing
similar, open product roadmaps from other products because of the verbosity /
level of detail.

Kudos to GitHub's team for doing such an excellent job in communicating and
managing the roadmap. Particularly given the size or the organization -- this
is no small feat.

------
kd913
It's 2020, the cost of an ipv4 address is more than $20 an address. Can there
be some focus to include ipv6 support so that perhaps those people in the
developing world who can't afford an ip address can access github and
contribute?

Such a mechanism would be an actual meaningful step for enabling access to
poorer communities.

~~~
slim
btw, Afrinic has probably the largest pool of unused addresses.

~~~
rasz
has or had?
[https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/17/another_afrinic_scand...](https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/17/another_afrinic_scandal/)

------
suyash
Actual Roadmap with KanBan Board :
[https://github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1](https://github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1)

~~~
fermienrico
Are we so sensitive to racism that the word "master" is offensive? There is a
task to change the default branch to "main".

Note: there is no "slave" branch.

Intent matters, not the literal meaning of the word taken a specific
orthogonal context. Not a single person in the millions of developers ever had
a perverse notion of what master branch means.

~~~
fooey
Are we so stubbornly "anti-sensitivity" that we have to have a fight over
changing a word?

The word is not necessary, so why does anyone have to be offended if it's
changed?

~~~
fermienrico
Not offended. The status quo = 'master'. You need to make a good reason to
change it. The onus is on _you_ to make a solid case to change the status quo.

I am fine with it, it is just so far fetched that it seems unnecessary and
pedantic. It would be hypocritical to target one thing but not the rest. How
about also removing the word "Master" from the dictionary? We should go the
full 9 yards you know.

What's next? We wanna lobby MasterCard to rebrand themselves? Because everyone
thinks that it is a card for the "Masters", right?

Absolutely ridiculous. I also heard some noise about the Chess game and colors
of the pieces.

~~~
bromuro
Take it easy - it is about time for a MasterCard rebranding :)

~~~
fermienrico
Lol, you never know.

If even I agree with cancel culture, I intentionally want to push back on it
because there is no nuance, there is no counter point being heard, there is
absolutely no check and balance. It is just mob rule and that's dangerous to
free thought and free speech. Immediately, after you read the previous
sentence, I bet some of you had an image of me pop up in your mind - "Stupid
Trump supporter, MAGA hat, gun loonie and a racist at heart". If it did, you
are a danger to the society just like those people that I described.

Soon, you'll have lawyers being cancelled because they're defending the racist
criminal who have the right to an attorney. Whatever is going on today is
extremely worrying.

------
bob1029
I really don't need a lot of fancy stuff in order for GitHub to be valuable to
me or my organization. Honestly, I did not find much of the roadmap to be
compelling.

For me, the core features that comprise my GH user story are:

\- Code

\- Pull Requests

\- Issues & Labels

We also have limited use of Actions (for check builds) and heavy use of the
API/Webhooks for integration with our own custom CI/CD tooling.

In my opinion, the biggest place where value should be added is in these 3
areas above. Some of the simplest ideas are the most powerful. We get an
incredible amount of mileage out of basics like issues & labels. If there were
additional aspects to issues similar to labels that could further enhance this
experience, I would be very interested. Our entire development process
revolves around issues to track tasks.

One of the things I've had in mind would be a way to build a markdown-defined
webform template that can be used for populating highly-structured issues
without requiring the user to edit a complex document each time.

For example, you could have CustomerTroubleTicketTemplate.md in a
.github/issue_templates/ path, and then when you go to click New Issue, a down
arrow could be provided that pops a list of all defined issue templates.
Selecting one would present the user with a webform (as defined in the
template markdown) that collects all required fields to create that issue. The
issue could be created with labels/assignments/etc as defined in the markdown
document. This would likely require enhancements to GFM.

Bonus points if there is some way to expose specific issue templates through
public GH pages so that your customers can submit tickets against your private
repositories even though they don't have direct access to your issue buckets.
I think a very small step in this direction could obviate a lot of use cases
people find with products like Zendesk (it would for us, anyways - we just
funnel ZD tickets back into GH issues).

------
gokhan
It's a longtime practice of Azure DevOps (former TFS) team [1][2] and many
from that team are now working under GitHub. Maybe that's a culture transfer
from MS.

[1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-
notes/...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-
notes/features-timeline)

[2]
[https://dev.azure.com/mseng/AzureDevOpsRoadmap/_workitems/re...](https://dev.azure.com/mseng/AzureDevOpsRoadmap/_workitems/recentlyupdated)

------
staysaasy
Kudos to Github for trying this. I'm excited to see more SaaS companies "call
their shots" and provide insight into their roadmap plans. It seems like a
natural evolution of the industry.

For any enterprise SaaS businesses trying this at home – keep in mind that any
product information that you publish publicly can and likely will be used
against you by a competitor in a sales cycle at some point, fairly or
unfairly. This might still be worth it overall, but is a real risk that isn't
obvious until it happens to you (or you observe your team doing it to someone
else).

------
flixic
In case you are interested in Dark Mode, it's not on this roadmap.

~~~
prepend
Am I the only one who does not care about Dark Mode? I find it neat that
someone cares about it enough to mention it is missing, over lots of other
features that are missing.

I see it in lots of products and kind of ignored it, but is this a priority
for users?

~~~
notafraudster
I don't make dark mode part of my choice of whether to use something or not,
but given I am using something, I always choose dark mode.

On OLED screens like my phones, black reduces energy use. On regular screens,
dark mode subjectively seems to make things easier on my eyes. I also use
f.lux and related technologies. I also sometimes use yellow-tinting screen
glasses. I have no idea if any of this is scientifically valid, but at this
point I can feel my eyes decline significantly as I age. My particular vision
is 20/20 but one of my eyes is much worse and this contributes to a lot of eye
strain. I also have pretty chronic headaches.

Since my entire ability to make money hinges on computer screens, I will take
whatever nonsense option seems, subjectively, to make things easier on myself
or preserve my longevity.

GitHub and HN are probably the two things I use most that do not support dark
mode natively. My sense is that as far as feature requests go, dark mode
typically does not tie up resources that otherwise would be allocated to more
functionality-based features. GitHub doesn't need to provision more servers,
for instance, in order to implement dark mode. HN already has colour
customization, we need only to be able to customize a few other colours to
allow dark mode natively.

------
jeffnappi
How about basic feature parity with GitLab?

GitHub - if you're listening, _PLEASE_ implement protected tags :)

[https://github.community/t/feature-request-protected-
tags/17...](https://github.community/t/feature-request-protected-tags/1742)

------
catchmeifyoucan
Super excited about auto-merge for PRs. "Today, the workflow for these users
entails submitting pull requests and then coming back to the site to merge and
delete the branch."

[https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/107](https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/107)

~~~
silviogutierrez
Just FYI, I've been using this for a while and it works very well:
[https://kodiakhq.com](https://kodiakhq.com)

You can self host if you want, easy on Heroku.

Plug and play.

------
cltsang
Interesting that there's no mention of agile tools like Project cards, issue
dependencies, etc..

I wonder if the plan to incorporate features from Azure DevOps is still on-
going.

~~~
aupright
If you're looking for agile power-ups to GitHub Issues, there's a few great
options in the ecosystem. Check out ZenHub if you're looking for things like
issue dependencies, epics, multi-repo boards, etc. and want to stay in GitHub.
GitKraken Boards are also a great option and integrate with their Git GUI.

~~~
spankalee
My team uses ZenHub extensively, but it's not that great for OSS projects IMO.
The extra metadata and organization that ZenHub allows isn't visible via
GitHub issues, so it's basically just for the core team.

Issue dependencies should be part of the core issue tracker. And GitHub has
multi-repo boards, but only for repose in the same org.

------
gigatexal
whoever or whatever team came up with the personal README's for ones github
profile needs to be given the keys to all of Github because no feature in all
of my years of using github has had such a profound "cool" factor than this.
It will also go a long way to solidify the site as a social network. I see it
replacing my resume, I will just send people that link, much like I used to
with a personal website.

The roadmap is nice and it's nice that we might get to see what is going on or
coming up and maybe have a say in it. This seems a lot like what Gitlab is
doing though, so perhaps they're trying to get some of Gitlab's goodwill?

------
rasz
I recently learned Github is internally using AWS, and not Azure, for file
storage !?!?! :o

for example [https://github.com/CnCNet/cnc-
ddraw/files/4974882/ddraw.zip](https://github.com/CnCNet/cnc-
ddraw/files/4974882/ddraw.zip) redirects to [https://github-production-
repository-file-5c1aeb.s3.amazonaw...](https://github-production-repository-
file-5c1aeb.s3.amazonaws.com/110366814/4974882?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-
SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWNJYAX4CSVEH53A%2F20200728%2Fus-
east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20200728T195408Z&X-Amz-
Expires=300&X-Amz-
Signature=4cee8b39040095c810769cf56f2ac509b26d14cd09ae3d04b00d007b6d637492&X-Amz-
SignedHeaders=host&actor_id=2623127&repo_id=110366814&response-content-
disposition=attachment%3Bfilename%3Dddraw.zip&response-content-
type=application%2Fx-zip-compressed)

~~~
hankchinaski
they will probably migrate at some point supposedly?

------
willow9886
Would be great to be able to "upvote" features.

~~~
mdaniel
From a certain perspective, this is what the :+1: and :-1: reaction emojis are
for, although I haven't checked to see if those are accessible via the issue
API

~~~
wonderlg
Of course they are. The problem here is that every issue is locked so no one
can react either.

------
open-paren
More direct link to the roadmap:
[https://github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1](https://github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1)

------
factorialboy
In comparison, the GitLab Roadmap:
[https://about.gitlab.com/direction/](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/)

~~~
willow9886
I tend to prefer the style GitHub has gone with. Easier to quickly identify
new features of interest.

~~~
sytse
If you prefer that style maybe [https://about.gitlab.com/upcoming-
releases/](https://about.gitlab.com/upcoming-releases/) is helpful.

------
jborichevskiy
Kudos to them, I want to see more of this.

Another great roadmap I enjoyed reading through was the one of IPFS. Formatted
somewhat differently (one long document) but still just gets me excited
reading through it while communicating key objectives and milestones.

[https://github.com/ipfs/roadmap](https://github.com/ipfs/roadmap)

------
LockAndLol
Nothing on ForgeFed and accepting pull/merge requests from other code
versioning hosts. Can't say I'm surprised.

------
dochtman
There was disappointingly little on the code review UX, or making the
(Android, in my case) apps better.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
That's a really nice presentation.

I hope that they are able to pull it off. It's ambitious, but they now have a
sweet sugar daddy, and can afford it.

I use GH for all my work, and look forward to seeing some of this come to be.

------
mderazon
This is very good and interesting to see.

Also, now that it's public, it's interesting to see as a non-enterprise user,
that many new planned features are going enterprise first

For example, private GitHub pages:
[https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/77](https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/77)

A long requested feature for private repos is going enterprise first. Not sure
why, I don't know if this is purely business decision or if it has a technical
reason

------
GordonS
Great to see a roadmap so we have an idea what's coming.

A little OT, but what I'd love to see on the roadmap is rolling back the
recent UI changes! Rounding every corner in sight just looks _wrong_ ; it
doesn't "suit" GitHub. The accompanying layout changes also don't help.

I reacted the same way during preview, and after living with it for a few
weeks I still feel the same - the recent UI changes still look and feel odd,
like it was little more than busywork.

------
The_rationalist
Sad to see that the biggest missing feature of github.com (and actually a
simple one) is _not_ on their roadmap, not even considered in the "future"
section...

[https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1125](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1125)

~~~
bastardoperator
To be fair this looks really simple to wire up using the API and a single
webhook.

~~~
The_rationalist
Yet nobody has done a great implementation of it. There is an unofficial
github.com action but e.g it doesn't allow to choose the branch name

~~~
bastardoperator
I would assume the branch name would just match the issue id?

------
jeremy_k
Interesting to see people opening issues for things they want when nothing in
the README suggests that Github was seeking community input. I realize that
this is possible due to the fact that it is an open source repository, but its
possible the issues could get flooded and this repository becomes less useful?

~~~
abalaji
If you click on the roadmap link in the main README, you can see the issues
selected for development on a GH Project Kanban board. [1]

[1]
[https://github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1](https://github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1)

------
llamataboot
Was actually hoping there would be more community features on the road map. I
know I'm in the minority, but the promise of social coding is still out there
waiting to be realized and more ability for open source projects to
collaborate in diverse ways would be welcome.

But Github discussions seems interesting!

------
zeckalpha
> Existing issues are currently read-only, and we are locking conversations,
> as we get started. Interaction limits are also in place to ensure issues
> originate from GitHub.

In other words: “our issue and community management functionality does not
scale.”

------
a13n
It looks so bad... there are great tools out there that are built specifically
for sharing your public roadmap with your users. Using GitHub for this is very
rough on the eyes, and just bad for usability.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Honestly, do not care, at all. The fact that they're doing it I think is
awesome. So many large cloud providers (cough, GCP, cough) are so loath to
give any visibility into their upcoming roadmaps, and it's extremely
frustrating. I totally understand priorities may change, but having a general
roadmap lets me plan much more easily.

------
voodootrucker
It would be nice if they would prioritize reliability over features. Their
uptime has been terrible lately.

------
jrochkind1
I see a LOT of planned continuing investment in "Actions". Makes sense.

------
adav
Look under the "Projects" tab to see it laid out more visually.

------
julius_set
So are we finally getting dark mode for Github on web?...

------
eyeball
When is this going to absorb / replace azure devops?

------
dabbit
Yay! Codespaces soon! Discussions too.

------
verroq
Glad to know they are working on this idiotic stuff:
[https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/63](https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/63)

