

Github service outage - manojlds
https://status.github.com/#content

======
gurgeous
I posted this as a separate thread but maybe I'll ask here. We're dead in the
water due to this latest outage. They seem to hit weekly now. I'm considering
switching to another provider today.

How does Bitbucket stack up in terms of reliability? Features are sort of
irrelevant compared to recurring downtime.

~~~
famousactress
Weekly? My experience must be different. This is definitely the worst one I've
noticed in two years of use.. but I think I've maybe noticed issues once every
6-8 months or so. Not weekly.

~~~
arohner
It's closer to weekly than biennial. At GitHub's size, there are minor hiccups
that affect a small number of users more often than any one user will see.

My company (<https://circleci.com>) uses GitHub OAuth and checks out code as
its core functionality. Believe me, I get emails _every_ time GitHub has an
issue for 30 seconds.

~~~
mh-
we're currently evaluating CI solutions and I've been meaning to give Circle a
look.

Am I overlooking a tour (or just a single screenshot?) on your website?

Based on skimming your docs it seems like this could be a much more
approachable solution than your competitors.. and based on the care taken in
the designing your website/brand I'm guessing you invested in making a good
UI. show it off! :)

edit: before someone suggests 'just sign up for the trial and look' -- as
mentioned, Circle's authentication is (understandably) via GitHub -- that
means authorizing them to _write to my private repositories_ without seeing
anything about the product.

~~~
pbiggar
Hey mh-, I'm the other founder. You're not overlooking a tour, there isn't one
at the moment.

Currently, our UI is boring. We (and most CI services) do a basic list-of-
builds UI. I don't think that's good enough, but we've been short staffed
until recently due to fund-raising, but now we're finally getting a chance to
think about how best to provide the best user experience around that.

The things that are amazing about Circle now are outside the UI. For example,
we can auto-parallelize long builds to run in a fraction of the time. Your
tests run blazingly fast on our boxes (we've spent months ensuring we're the
fastest service by a long way). We do personalized notifications of failures
(cause you don't care what your colleague does on his branch). So please don't
judge us on how pretty our pictures are :)

FYI: we hate the "write to my private repos" thing too, but with GitHub's
permissions model there isn't a better alternative (there are alternatives,
they're all bad).

~~~
mh-
Hi Paul, thanks for the reply!

I wasn't judging you guys on the 'pictures' at all. :) Was just giving some
candid feedback from my experience. I actually signed up write after I wrote
that, and was going to post again once I'd had a chance to try it.

I did get to try it briefly and I actually think the UI, while simple, is
better than the other (albeit much more complex) solutions I've been looking
at.

>FYI: we hate the "write to my private repos" thing too, but with GitHub's
permissions model there isn't a better alternative (there are alternatives,
they're all bad).

IMO, this would be a big improvement and is doable: let me sign up (still via
GitHub auth) without asking for the repo or user scopes. Then have a call-to-
action that upgrades the token, as part of the guided welcome into Manage
Repos. _[I realize this could hurt your funnel, perhaps offer this path buried
in the FAQ somewhere if that's a concern]_

If you pass nothing for the _scope_ param to the GitHub API, that gives you
the authentication piece with read-only access to the user's public stuff.
Then just add a "Hey, we can only see your public repos by default - click
here [..]" that sends them into the web flow again with the additional scopes,
to upgrade your auth token.

Also, while I'm giving unsolicited advice :) - it may be obvious, but letting
the user know that when they follow a repo (and just doing this on the first
repo they use would be fine) that you're going to add an SSH key would
probably be a good addition. Since adding a deploy key sends an email to all
admins of the organization, some users might want to give people a heads-up
they're trying out Circle.

. . .

Anyway, Circle looks great already and I'm eager to see what other stuff you
guys have in store. I'll certainly be using it for some of my projects.

~~~
pbiggar
Thanks for the feedback! There's definitely a lot of ways we can do this, and
each has tradeoffs. One tradeoff that came up when we tried to switch to
public-only authentication first is that the login button needed to have
different scopes - and apparently a lot of people try to sign up via that
button.

I agree that we need more warning with the SSH keys. I'll try to figure out
where to put that - we used to warn in a previous iteration, but we're moving
very quickly and some things get lost sometimes (especially with A/B tests).
We're doing a lot of work to provide user education around what they should
expect from Circle, so that's definitely a must-have. Thanks!

------
Quekster
GitHub seems to go down way too often nowadays.

------
prezjordan
Working on a school project with a friend, and we've been unable to push for
several hours.

Funny part is, we were configuring his MacBook with his GitHub credentials,
and initially thought we had some sort of error uploading his SSH keys. Turns
out it was a service outage.

------
purephase
This is unfortunate. I realize that it is distributed, but when you're in a
major push it really sucks to have to scramble around to setup another host to
get working again.

I love their service, but they really need to get their reliability issues
figured out.

------
f055
I have bad luck, this happens every time I want to note an idea into a task...

