
GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree - tenet
https://github.com/github/archive-program/blob/master/TheTechTree.md
======
dgellow
The text uses the words "culture", "human history", and "the world/our world".
But reading the list of sources included, it seems to mean "the English
culture" of US + UK. That's a bit of a shame IMHO.

~~~
mumblemumble
I am assuming, based on the fact that it's a project by an American company,
that this is largely being done by functionally monolingual English speakers.
I wouldn't want them to attempt to speak for other cultures. And I wouldn't
want to shame them for not attempting to speak for others.

It's a bit unfortunate that they use the word "human" so expansively when the
scope is so limited, it's true. But it's a new project, so let's give them the
benefit of the doubt and assume that that's meant to reflect the project's
aspirations. Even if the reality, after only a few short months, doesn't quite
achieve it. Tech culture is supposed to value iteration, and accept that
things won't necessarily get it all right on the very first try.

A more constructive way to make sure other cultures are reflected would be to
say, "Hey, this is a great idea. But looks like you're only covering
Anglophone sources right now. Can we help by contributing additional sources?"

~~~
dgellow
I'm all for iterative work. I'm just pointing an issue in the current state of
this project. It's a common behaviour from huge and global US companies
(GitHub IS huge and global) to kind of forget that other cultural groups
exist, I'm used to it. It's a bit dishonest in this specific case because they
present the project as a "humanity preservation project".

------
threeseed
Some curious selections there:

\- 4 books on SQL but none on key/value, graph, document, time series,
bigtable etc databases.

\- 3 books on C, 2 on JS but none on Haskell (leading FP language) or Scala
(first to bridge FP/OOP).

\- None on search engines / algorithms even though it's the most widely used
aspect of computing.

\- None on anything mobile even though it's the dominant computing platform.

~~~
dataking
I was also surprised they picked "Programming Rust" over "The Rust Programming
Language" book.

~~~
ffdjjjffjj
I’m sure Steve Klabnik will eat me alive, but having read both I think it’s
the better book!

~~~
steveklabnik
Nah I think it’s also a good book, and am glad that both exist! For many
people, it will be the better book.

------
indy
It's strange that they've omitted video-games which are the intersection of
software and culture these days.

~~~
dathinab
Yea, I mean video-games are THE way of software sneaking into culture.

I mean there is also programming culture but it's constantly changing, split
into a innumerable number of sometimes conflicting variants and is often more
like work culture then art. But it's also art, it's complicated tbh. I mean
how many opinions are based around what feels nice and/or looks nice instead
of what works most reliable and well? Through then this is also where
innovations sometimes starts, with libraries which do look and feel nice but
do not yet work supper well.

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jcahill
As an archivist with work in Svalbard, I'm broadly in support of the notion
here.

But the 100 Classics approach to media that seems to be showcased in this
provisional reamde fundamentally dooms the collection to irrelevance.

~~~
micpalmia
Not knowing much about archiving, this also struck me as a fairly superficial
way to build an "archive" \- seems more like an opinionated "best of" than an
actually useful archive for future humans. I would like to see an actual OPAC!

------
TedDoesntTalk
> Computers are great, but in a way, so 20th century; it's networked computers
> which are, at least arguably, the real technical revolution of the 21st.

It then goes on to list all things created in the 20th century: TCP/IP,
ethernet, DNS, HTTP, etc.

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polote
> We believe women's unique role in founding and shaping computing and
> technology deserves its own section.

Hummm, ok, what about men's role ?

One of the biggest complain women make, is the world keeps reminding them that
they are a women. Well this is one of them

~~~
screye
It's kind of counter intuitive, but writing about women's role in computing
directly sheds light on men's role in the same. It is one of those sentences,
where what is not said is just as important.

> We believe women's unique role in founding and shaping computing and
> technology deserves its own section.

> <Hidden> _And men 's role doesn't deserve a section, because literally
> everything else you read about was done by them_. <\Hidden>

I too think, the on-the-nose-ness of communicating women's roles here, is
annoying to both men and women of 2020. However, this document is written with
societal-recovery in mind. In that case, I would rather it be explicitly
mentioned that women deserve just as relevant a role in tech development, lest
some post-apocalyptic male-supremacist historian notice that almost everything
important in tech was invented by men and postulate that, 'Tech should be the
domain of men and only men.'

I do hope they also talk about the internal culture of nerds, societal-
outcasts and less-than-macho men, that shaped tech as we know it. I don't
think the uniqueness of nerdy tech culture is explored enough.

Better safe than sorry.

~~~
bengale
> <Hidden> And men's role doesn't deserve a section, because literally
> everything else you read about was done by them. <\Hidden>

I'm not sure why anyone would assume men did all the work, until some
patronising head pat of a section is added to show that "women do things too".

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vnxli
How often are tech trees used in software development/ project management?

I’m leading a hardware development project and I made a tech tree for my team-
but I had only ever seen them in video games. Would love some professional
examples

~~~
raziel2p
Could you elaborate on how you made a tech tree for a development
team/project? I'm struggling to imagine how that would look.

~~~
withinboredom
Usually when joining a fairly technical team, the team has put together "learn
these things" to get up to speed. For example, on our team where I am
currently, you should be fairly familiar with statistics and maths after the
first year on the team.

~~~
raziel2p
Okay, so it's just an onboarding-type list but with "dependencies" to
structure them like a tree?

~~~
vnxli
For us it's less about onboarding to the team and more of what tech do we need
to develop for this product to meet client spec. I'm using it more as an
organizational tool to structure which tasks need to be done sequentially
(i.e. the API needs to be complete before we can test it with the software)
and the tasks that can be done concurrently (i.e. the hardware can be
developed and tested the same time as the software, up to a point).

I think you could use a gantt chart to accomplish the same thing.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart)

And your comment about the dependencies is still accurate for my team since we
have to be efficient about doing the concurrent parts together to make sure we
get this product to our client on time.

It's been useful for me to visualize all the moving parts of my project and
see options that I have in a way that is familiar to me.

------
rwmj
No books on SML or other ML-derived languages, or Haskell, or Prolog? But
somehow there's space for books on Golang and Java??

------
z29LiTp5qUC30n
It s missing solid pieces, like how to bootstrap a C compiler from nothing:
[https://github.com/oriansj/stage0](https://github.com/oriansj/stage0)

or how to use that C compiler to bootstrap the rest of the software:
[https://guix.gnu.org/](https://guix.gnu.org/)

~~~
bewuethr
How to actually read QR codes, untar/decompress, bootstrap a C compiler and so
on is supposed to be part of the index on each reel, but I'd really love to
see these instructions! They are mentioned as the "Representation Information"
(see [https://git.io/JJDLP](https://git.io/JJDLP)).

------
bovermyer
The books under Fiction, Culture, and History - meant to demonstrate our
"current culture" \- include a number of pretty bleak titles.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
On the topic of "bleak" and "societal collapse", it is notable that they chose
"Blood Meridian" over "The Road" in Cormac McCarthy's works.

~~~
defen
Blood Meridian is an account of how we got _here_. If civilization falls apart
to the extent that they need this resource, they'll at least presumably know
how they got _there_ and won't need a fictionalized account of societal
collapse.

------
justinclift
Ugh, there's a basic PostgreSQL book listed on there, which (from the Amazon
reviews) seems to be the worst possible pick. eg it's rated as 1 star. :(

[https://www.amazon.com/PostgreSQL-Development-Essentials-
Man...](https://www.amazon.com/PostgreSQL-Development-Essentials-Manpreet-
Kaur/dp/1783989009)

That's really unfortunate, as there are a _tonne_ of PostgreSQL books around,
many of which are very good. eg:

[https://www.amazon.com/Practical-SQL-Beginners-Guide-
Storyte...](https://www.amazon.com/Practical-SQL-Beginners-Guide-
Storytelling/dp/1593278276)

[https://www.amazon.com/PostgreSQL-Running-Practical-
Advanced...](https://www.amazon.com/PostgreSQL-Running-Practical-Advanced-
Database-ebook/dp/B076C4WLBP/)

Conversely, the MySQL book right above it in the list seems to be one of the
highest rated ones on Amazon:

[https://www.amazon.com/Learning-MySQL-MariaDB-Heading-
Direct...](https://www.amazon.com/Learning-MySQL-MariaDB-Heading-Direction-
ebook/dp/B00VDHRFJI)

As GitHub uses MySQL internally, this _seems_ like favoritism.

------
pintxo
I did not immediately see anything on standards? ISOC, IETF, W3C, ISO...

Do they hope to redevelop a single standard to rule them all from the books
alone?

------
d4r114
I am not sure how civilisations thousands of years in the future, with
potentially a lower level of technology could be able to decipher the data
from the archive, seeing the encoding complexity and the number of steps
required. Considering how much money GitHub received from microsoft, I think
they could have recorded all uncompressed, engraved in stone...

------
airstrike
A bit disappointed that this would favor Flask over Django, particularly if
RoR is favored over, say, Sinatra

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> In addition to this technical documentation, we have also included a
> selection of artistic, cultural, and historical works, to help describe the
> overall cultural context in which this archive was created.

Since a lot of the culture described later is specifically related to Western
culture, I find it interesting that the Bible is not included.

For good or ill, the Bible had a profound cultural effect on Western
civilization, and specifically the King James Version on the Anglosphere.

------
pseudosavant
Does anyone else feel like it is a HUGE miss that Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy isn't included. :P

------
yaysayer
Marvellous. Now GitHub attaches its brand to the entire work of open source.

This is the most _real case_ of cultural appropriation in the last decade.

But the corporate smoke screens focus on bogus cultural appropriation and
related issues, so this one will yet again go unnoticed.

I'm thinking about updating my OSS licences.

~~~
corford
Seems fair enough to me... they're footing the massive bill of organising,
transcoding, archiving and documenting all this.

It's OSS, so if you want to do something similar but without GH branding
nothing stops you (assuming you have enough cash on hand to pull it all off).

~~~
andlAP
> they're footing the massive bill of organising, transcoding, archiving and
> documenting all this.

Which is done out of self interest and completely pales in comparison to the
time that OSS contributors have donated.

> It's OSS, so if you want to do something similar ...

Yeah, yeah, just because you can does not make it right. See Google groups.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Unfortunately for utopianists, self-interest is how things get done that would
otherwise never get done. It powers most open source work.

If a company or individual does something just to slap their name on it, so be
it.

The combined open source effort vs Github's effort shouldn't be compared as it
doesn't make sense. Just like it doesn't make sense to compare the work of a
translator vs. the work of writing the original material—the translator is
still doing valuable work regardless. The translator isn't "taking credit" for
the original work.

You should compare what Github is doing with other endeavors doing the same
thing.

~~~
amkolap
This is a rambling discussion style that cannot be responded to. The GitHub
shills win. May you enjoy your undeserved SV webshit salaries.

------
nagarc
Uber like platform needed for the entire software development consulting.
Don't say that we have freelancer! Still it has to go a long way to reach this
level

------
PopeDotNinja
Dumb question... do they have to purge code when fielding a GDPR request?

~~~
jovial_cavalier
I don't think the archive itself is publicly accessible.

------
elongatedMusku
Where is SICP?

------
tenet
The Tech Tree is a selection of works intended to describe how the world makes
and uses software today, as well as an overview of how computers work and the
foundational technologies required to make and use computers.

