I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool, though.
Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts).
I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool.
I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of touch” I must be, because I have never considered it to be a social venue or competitive arena.
It’s just a place I keep my code. I’m quite grateful for it.
Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old. For adults, there lies incredible satisfaction in mastering any but the most exploitative professions or jobs and fulfilling them dutifully, even if they are be no means "fun".
what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"
A couple years ago I dubbed this trend "Flanders Computing" [1]. I haven't really given much thought about its origins, but it's probably got to do with the increasing demand for happiness that we Americans hold dear.
Collectively I think it's entered the American psyche that the answer to happiness is to avoid anything that makes us anxious or uncomfortable, which results in that toddler-level approach in many things. i.e. Ban things labeled "toxic", ban the boo-boos, keep everyone safe with happy feelings in this space only. But admittedly my thoughts are incomplete.
"The desire for more positive experience is in itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience."
from "The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck" by Mark Mason
Sounds like new age stoicism? Roman philosophers, 2000 years ago, were teaching us to curb our desires for they ultimately lead to dissapointment when things don't work out.
The Enchiridion of Epictetus is a good place to start. You'll also learn how to feel when your favorite mug drops, or when a friend pokes your eye in a wrestling match - spoiler: the answer is not giving it a fuck (for lack of a better term).
Maybe that's because our sensory systems can't really feel states, only differences between states. Hot only exists in comparison to our memory of cold. Without that comparison, there is simply numbness.
If that's a general principle, it implies that happiness can only be felt as an improvement over the past. That would also explain why sadness is necessary for us to be able to feel happiness, and why we're attracted to tragic art. Someone who is the same level of happy all the time will become numb to it, but constantly becoming happier is unsustainable in the same way as a drug addiction.
>What they are missing is the knowledge of and empathy for people who are actually harmed by these behaviors.
Don't worry, most people asking for such bans don't have any real empathy for people who are actually harmed by these behaviors either.
And inversely, most people who are actually harmed, don't care for such bans, they prefer substantive and inherent (felt and voluntary) changes, not bans.
But then plenty of the same people that seek to police speech online and to claim the moral high ground are capable of and comfortable with quite horrible and unjustified forms of harassment, e.g. extreme levels of doxxing, getting people sacked for hurty tweets, even hounding people to suicide.
Let's not pretend there aren't plenty of cynics that employ woke culture to sinister ends.
Why do you think this is specifically a 'western society' thing? Browse Japanese sites and online tools and there is just as much gamification and 'thrilling' graphics and animation - if not more. Github looks like a technical white-paper in comparison.
Of course it sounds ridiculous. Boolean algebra says the validity of a statement's converse is independent of the original. P → Q, tells us little about Q → P.
You could make the argument. Japan was actively xenophobic and exclusionary to practically all but the Dutch. And after that their biggest influence was U.S. occupation during the 50s. Lots of “western” influence there.
(Obviously in actual critical work, the word western isn’t useful at all as it doesn’t have much meaning)
Japanese culture is quite different from American culture.
We did rebuild them, and McArthur is revered as a god, over there.
But they really have their own culture, and some aspects can strike us as quite strange (as, I am sure, some aspects of our culture weird them out).
I worked for a Japanese company, and went there, multiple times a year, for about twenty years (all Tokyo, so I can't speak for the rest of Japan). I think that there are a number of Japanese and US/EU expats that live in Japan, on this board.
While he's undeniably a famous historical figure in Japan, my impression is that the majority of Japanese people don't have any strong opinions about him. After all, how many people actually care so much about historical figures when they're busy watching cat videos on YouTube? But for the people who do have some interest, I assume many have mixed feelings on the matter, which is natural for citizens of a former military dictatorship turned democracy only because they lost the world war. The rest are far-right people who, as you can imagine, hate him with a passion, though I do hope they're only a minority of Japanese people whose voices are amplified by Twitter echo chambers.
I'll have to hunt down the article that talks about it, but McArthur was actually "Emperor of Japan" for a few years, in everything but title.
I had several people point out his office on the top floor of a building facing the Emperor's Palace (some of the priciest real estate on Earth), in hushed, reverential tones.
Yes, he did have a strong political influence during US occupation, and yes, there may be people who worship him, but I can guarantee that it's not the norm. I'm actually fluent enough in Japanese to know this.
Because the kinds of people who likes to pile on McArthur are mostly far-right people who are trying to discredit the positive things he did, especially his team's work on drafting the current Japanese constitution which established a democratic system with strong safeguards for human rights. It's not McArthur's own character that I'm taking issues with.
I remember once it felt a bit jarring when I heard native American cultures contrasted with "western" ones. Surely they are more "western" than Europeans.
"Western" in this context is referring to the western tip of the Eurasian landmass. The western hemisphere is part of the cultural "West" because of the European diaspora, not because of its geographic location.
Correct. The division goes back to the Roman Empire and the reforms of Diocletian. Arguably however there were underlying cultural differences between the Latin Romans and the Greek Romans that were beneath those reforms and the later Great Schism between East and West.
Words are never some sort of perfect encapsulation of their meaning. They only achieve that via their definitions.
What you're suggesting is basically using the etymological fallacy as a basis for changing words. Because of linguistic drift, a majority of words would have up be changed at some point - words like "nice" which came to mean their opposite, for example.
I think my suggestion that we should "perhaps" choose different words occasionally was mistaken for a demand that we must.
Choice of words is an individalized thing and language allows us to be as flexible as we like within still getting the point across. If I choose to say "European" instead of "western" when contrasting with indigenous Americans that sounds fine to me. If you don't make that same choice that's fine too. We'll all be understood.
>It's my personal opinion that when we see such a discongreguity that we should perhaps choose other words.
Not really. Then we'd be changing terms established for centuries, that most people understand in their two contexts (geographical and cultural), with some new words we'd have to explain every time we use them -- so making things worse.
If I contrasted indigenous Americans with "European" culture rather than a "western" one, you would completely understand the meaning and it wouldn't be a big deal.
I wouldn't know if you mean "European culture" in the sense of something unique continental European (the way Europeans have unique cultural traits different from US traits, e.g. analytical vs continental philosophy), or the shared western culture Europeans and US Americans, and Australians, etc have?
That would sound to me like a deliberate misread in the same way that taking "west" literally is to you. You would know what I meant to say, and so would I should you say it the other way.
It's common to divide US/European culture (even though both western), or to include Japan in the western culture (even though not in the west, and their culture is not European of origin -- west in that sense is more like "westernized").
Native Americans and pre-Christian pagan Europeans had a lot in common. Both cultures that honor seasonal cycles, animals, nature, ancestors, animism etc.
Unfortunately “western” is now seen as the Abrahamic judeo-Christian capitalistic worldview, even though the west sprang out of pagan Greece and Rome.
Rome was Christian when the Western and Eastern empires were founded, and when they fell. My understanding is that modern West/East etymology is heavily influenced by the Western/Eastern Roman empires.
>Unfortunately “western” is now seen as the Abrahamic judeo-Christian capitalistic worldview, even though the west sprang out of pagan Greece and Rome.
The west "sprang out of pagan Greece and Rome" when they decided to become Christian. The actual pagans had been slowly abandoning paganism as a dead-end and turning more into esoteric religions and neo-planonism etc and the influence of Egyptian etc religions for several centuries before Christianism was a thing...
"Both cultures" ? What cultures ? Neither pre-Colombian Americas nor Europe shared a culture on their respective side. Even if most of Europe shared a common Indo-European root, religious practices were varying widely. Be it from the cross-pollination with different tradition (pre-Indo-European, Semitic and whatnot) or social changes. It's very hard to argue the official Roman religion as practiced in cities was any more "closer to nature" than Catholicism is.
A cursory glance at Japanese culture and values shows me that America has had far less influence on its development than you believe. On the scale of individuality/community, Japan is further on the opposite side. The anime/manga industry is quite different than anything we have in the West, and a lot of their values tie into the things that are depicted, what's okay, what's not okay, etc. We often see traditional influences on their media that simply don't exist in the West in the same way (comparison of the American and Japanese versions of The Ring: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01956051.2011.5...).
Yes. First you attribute what Japan is to how the US rebuilt it, when in fact this society has thousands of years of history before the US. Sure we can't deny US influence after WW2 and how integrated they are in the global economy, that doesn't make it a westernized country.
Continental Europe is considered, by and large, to be "The West", as is the United States. In this context, the US is a new country but very much representative of the Western world.
Culturally yes, but it depends on context. As mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world , during the Cold War and after, "Western World" was roughly analogous with "First world".
That is to say, (again, roughly) - "modern, stable, (primarily) capitalist, democracies aligned with Western Europe/USA".
So, in the context of geopolitics and political ideologies many people still consider it to include Japan and South Korea. Yours truly included.
Not that I care as much about the "aligned with" part anymore, but certainly the "modern, stable, democracy" part.
I hold a diametrically opposite viewpoint and would like to present it.
I think people would be happier if they did think in terms of a six year old. There is nothing inherently "professional" about using drab and dull interfaces for coding and going to an office where you all dress in identical suits.
There is quiet satisfaction in achieving mastery like you mention, but (IMO) it should be accompanied by a pleasant feeling too. GitHub's cheerful, bright colors and interface enable that for me, and I'm grateful to them for it. GitLab and Bitbucket feel flat, dreary, and dull by comparison, honestly. It's like going to a brightly colored room with nice sofas v/s an all-grey room with a white desk. Which one are you going to be more productive in?
I think this is also why Slack is incredibly successful for something that is basically an IRC-in-browser implementation. It made work "fun" for a lot of people and thus steam-rollered opposers.
Thank you. I 100% agree. We've for some reason decided that "professional" and "enterprise grade" means dull colors, ugly interfaces, and zero room for "hacking" and "experimentation". That code needs to be "work". That the poster of the comment would claim that this is akin to the thinking of a six year old is in itself curious.
It's as if we're letting the jaded cynics of the world win.
TBF, I don't think the author is saying that Github needs to be fun, but rather that it used to be and now isn't. It's lost a nice quality that it had.
having a hard time understanding what the author is saying. i never considered github to be a place to have fun at. and i am surprised by this article and curious how other people see or use github...
by the way, the trending page is not everything about github!
i keep discovering and bookmarking github projects every now and then. for example, this repository where the author has implementations for trigonometry functions in k&r c: https://github.com/richgel999/triglib
i don't believe github has lost its quality either!
they recently pushed that new layout preview that made the app usable when my zoom level is at 150%. i was very happy about that. i can't wait for github to provide a better search engine. and i have the feeling that they are totally working on it :)
I don't use trending often enough to know that I'm correct in saying this, but I get the impression that the author is describing a shift from "most star-ed projects each day" to some new algorithm which seems to resemble "most interesting projects as of late", with the later being less dynamic. I suppose that's in part why they feel less excitement and less value in the tool.
I agree that a lot of the recent changes to GH have been really cool. This article sort of makes me wish that features like the trending page were more configurable.
Agreed, but I think us old farts are complaining the author thinks GitHub has changed while they have not and isn't considering that maybe their perspective shifted during the time as well.
I think the headline differs (perhaps for traffic). The post seems to discuss concerns about the discovery/trending feature - how developers "discover" new code.
no doubt GH wanted to develop their social site aspects to increase engagement and "stickiness" but I don't think they ever succeeded much, so while it's obviosuly different for the author, it's not much of a loss for everyone else.
I think it's a consequence of gamifying absolutely everything. If you had a online tool I used to quietly manage production at my cardboard box factory and then you went and added leader boards, badges, xp, recognition points and an influencer score, then box manufacturing better be pretty bloody exciting for me from now on. We now have an entire generation of software developers who have never known these tools without the gamified experience.
> If you had a online tool I used to quietly manage production at my cardboard box factory and then you went and added leader boards, badges, xp, recognition points and an influencer score, then box manufacturing better be pretty bloody exciting for me from now on. We now have an entire generation of software developers who have never known these tools without the gamified experience.
Maybe I'm just a little too old, but I've always rolled my eyes at those kinds of features and then ignored them. I find it impossible to imagine anyone actually caring about their badges or XP score on some company intranet wiki.
That's what makes those systems so great. It has a positive effect on the people that DO care, and essentially no negative effect on anyone else. It's a free win.
They are a distraction -- and many websites utilise dark patterns to make those UI elements hard to ignore.
Plus many professional tools need to make use of every square centimetre on the display, and putting this "fun" cruft in it is going to detract from the usefulness of the tool because it now can't accommodate all the necessary UI elements.
I guess I would come from the opposite direction and say: If you can make something important and useful - but generally seen as boring - “fun” there are big wins all around.
The jobs in one corner vs. fun in another usually creates a system where everything that’s fun is unfortunately useless, from a professional perspective.
And some people like that! They want to work for 8 hours and make memes/play games the rest of the time. They don’t miss the “lost” time at all.
But some of us really want to convert that useless time into something useful. You can hate us if you want, but I don’t think we are necessarily wrong to want this.
Example: I just don’t have enough time. I’m noticing now that when I take even 30 minutes off, in terms of my productivity- it hurts. I’ve
personally concluded that the concept of “free time” just doesn’t apply to me, and I don’t really have any.
Another example: at a certain level, given the right approach, probably anything can be fun. Physics can be fun! Linear algebra can be fun! But you know as well as I do that when people talk about fun colloquially, they never mean linear algebra. So pushing back on what is “fun” exactly can have big on the job benefits.
In this context, switching 30 minutes over from “mindless entertainment” to “somewhat professionally useful entertainment” is a massive win. Enough to get me to stop doing one thing and do something else, actually.
I would guess a lot of people on Twitter would be in the same boat, based on how they use it.
> Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old.
Depends what you mean by "western society". A good chunk of Europeans I knew (including in Eastern Europe where I live) share the same mindset as your parent poster: a version control is just a tool and it is gauged on the basis of how much it helps you in your work. Absolutely zero fun factor required. We just want it to be useful and not get in the way (which, admittedly, Git itself isn't quite good at).
(I) There's still a relative scarcity of developers at any skill (even if there's no shortage of class-N developers taking their shot at class-(N+1) work).
(II) I'm not a progressive politically, but Western Society has generally improved. Bigger McDonalds meals that make you fatter is "improved" too under the logic of the market. Because developers are relatively scarce, a greater share of this improvement goes to what they want (whereas in burger flipping, the share gone to better golf clubs for execs is comparatively larger).
(III) There's something about law enforcement that attracts a certain kind of personality. I was never drawn to LEO (as a cop, bail bondsman, mall security, anything) because I don't have these personality traits. The same goes for computer programmers. There's certainly a childish trait going on that isn't present in Mad Men's Don Draper (but then, who knows if this guy existed); the web itself gravitates to a light, rounded, primary-colors visual language. I think in part there's a whiz-kid dynamic where many of us were much much more capable than adults in a moment of extraordinary technology shift (the introduction of the internet), whereas in previous generations adults knew better and youngsters wanted to emulate them. ("Never trust anyone over 30" has been around for a long time, but it was an angry sentiment, whereas now 40-year-olds are welcome to emulate whiz-kids if they still have it).
We need new and shiny things to challenge us, maintain established neural pathways and develop new ones. It's a physiological need for healthy brain functioning.
Yes, it is childlike, but there is no shame in that-- if anything, history is proving more and more that the generations who maintained that everything must be as repetitive and miserable as possible had no idea what they were talking about-- and are now dying with active diagnoses of dementia and Alzheimer's.
My guess is that it started as a differentiator in the market. This is 'fun', other things are not. Then it leaked into other places, such as the workplace which became increasingly infantilized at ultimately the detriment of the worker (benefits include: shitty health insurance, ping pong tables and foosball leagues!!). This further led to the internalization of natural negative or neutral feelings: you feel down? What's wrong with you? Everyone else is having fun! This is fun! Your job is fun! You must be broken, therefore you need to fix yourself.
Fun may not be the right word for it. Github certainly never has deserved a description reserved for a world-class roller coaster... I don't think I've ever been "thrilled" by Github, but I've been very satisfied, contented, and sometimes amused by the experience. A positive experience really is useful as it makes getting other developers to comply with the process - something that was really lacking in source control prior to Github (and to a degree git itself).
I think the prominence of consumption industries like entertainment, media and social media have hooked us on the idea of happiness/meaning as perpetual bliss. I suspect these industries learned it from advertising, an industry which they created and evolved. The schools and religious organizations have tried to follow suit, with only mixed success.
"Fun" is a very poor imitation of "zen" or "peace" (the Christian concept) or "enlightenment" (the Buddhist concept), but has become sort of the sine qua non of secular Western democratic capitalist societies.
If nobody does it, it would be fine. If everybody does it, then we're worse off than before. But if some do it, and others don't, then the ones who do it win big.
I think you could benefit from laying out a few examples, because on my own I’m struggling to put your claim into more concrete terms that I can relate to.
I think ultimately Sourceforge fell from grace because it wasn't "fun", whatever that may mean; it was lacking the social features, poor UX, etc. Many things that make it boring or "not fun".
I've looked at some tools used by Google - mailing lists, Gerrit, etc - none of those look fun. For a casual like me, fun is important.
I don't do much with open source because I don't have the headspace, willpower or persistence to contribute much so the discussion is a bit wasted on me, but I've used both Github, Gitlab and Stash (Atlassian) for work projects; the feedback loop that tools like this give is super important to me.
I think Sourceforge fell from grace because of underhanded tactics like hijacking projects and bundling adware no-one wanted with their downloads, then lying about it.
I never once thought "Sourceforge is boring". I thought they became villains.
To be fair though, they declined in popularity and mindshare and had a change of ownership a few times before it came to that. The sourceforge that served up malware in 2013 bore little resemblance to the one from the 90s.
I feel like it was more like: their offerings were no longer unique, the original team probably moved on, they couldn't make money, and they turned to desperation.
Yep [0], after been bought by Dice (they also drained off the Freshmeat and Slashdot communities around that time, then froze the former "as a result of low traffic levels").
I kind of do have "fun" with GH. I follow people and see what repos they have starred, or code/issues they're working on. I also follow repos and check the source code that's being committed from time to time. Just for fun, to learn new stuff. The "Explore repositories" option did help me to find a couple of interesting repos.
I feel that at some point GH decided to distance themselves from the social aspect of the platform, but I still cling to it.
There are two sides to github consumption - active and passive.
On passive side - we are happy to stick to basics of git on CLI / IDE and get the job done of a version control. And the site is usually to configure CI/CD and so on.
However on active consumption of open source - it is all about discovery of repos relevant to tech you are into and people behind them. It is so amazing to go and find a good committer profile and see what repos he follows.
And the new github trending is simply axing their own feet here.
Your clash with the conventional usage and connotation of these terms was probably intended, but how is browsing repos active consumption (and vice versa)? Isn't creating and collaborating on projects much more active than just looking at interesting stuff?
1. A git-aware Google Drive, where I could stick version-controlled code I wanted to sync between computers and possibly share with colleagues (and also create a paper trail if someone beats me to the bunch publishing something, ha)
2. As a CDN serving open-source projects I depended on, but discovered almost exclusively by other means
None of my GitHub-hosted code ever had a README.md, I never starred anything, and I often never even visited the repos I depended on (their documentation would be hosted elsewhere and copying-and-pasting the GH URL from there was all I needed to do to depend on it). If I visited an Issues page, it was because I got there through googling an error message, not because I went there through GH's UI.
This Drive / CDN usage pattern is sort of the baseline, "passive" level of engagement with GH imo.
If I'm being honest (and maybe others who are saying they don't care about the "fun" side of GH would agree), I have a knee-jerk slightly negative reaction to this side of Github. And it's because I don't really spend my free time contributing to open source projects. When I was younger I worked on more personal projects, and I coded in my free time just to learn new technologies, but I do this less and less now and am quite happy with that. Probably 90%+ of the code I've written in the past 10 years (some of it quite clever and solving some quite interesting problems, if I do say myself) has been for employers. I don't think that makes me a worse future employee than someone who contributes more to open source, and I feel very fulfilled spending my nights and weekends doing other non-programming things.
I'm glad that others have fun with open source and follow along and contribute to projects. It's amazing and it has benefitted me directly with the libraries I use. But as far as the social pressure of needing to be active on Github, for a while that seemed like it might become an expectation for all programmers. And I'm very glad that it seems to be on the decline now.
Edit: and as far as browsing for new libraries and solutions to use in a project, I guess I haven't ever found Github to be very useful for that. There's no easy way to judge the quality of a library, I have come across a lot of things that oversell themselves in the README and are very buggy and incomplete, as well as a lot of things that are maybe used in a small niche in production and very battle hardened but don't currently have a large active community. For me, Twitter and blogs or other discussion forums have been a much higher signal way to find libraries with the reviews of people actually vouching for them as being solid and broadly useful.
This is how I have "fun" with it as well. O wouldn't even consider myself a developer but thanks to my interest in Docker, GitHub has been a source of fun and now I maintain an automated build that integrates both platforms and now has 100k downloads.
Never had any "fun" with github either.
I have had my account since 2013 and I've just learned about this "trending page" thing. Can anyone explain what's it useful for?
The Trending page is news to me too. I discover GitHub repositories by googling for solutions to my problems or by following links in the sites of package managers (Ruby, Python, Node, Elixir.) I seldom check the other repositories of an account unless I have reasons to believe they do something else I need. What they follow, maybe never.
This may also highlight one of the contrasts between my approach, and that of many of today’s engineers.
I am almost exclusively a Principal author of my work; with dozens of repos, and six figures of LoC (probably seven figures, if we include the code not available in public repos). I think I may have one forked repo; an embedded Web server library that I needed to tweak a bit to make work for my ffmpeg wrapper project.
This is not necessarily a good thing. By authoring my own code, I limit my scope. People who rely heavily on dependencies can have awesome results.
But they need to be very careful about the provenance and quality of these dependencies.
Dependency discovery is an important part of the vetting process. If we have choices, we don’t need to settle for second-best.
Also, I know that, for many folks, learning is a driver for repo discovery.
A lot of forks can indicate an inquisitive and open-minded approach to software development.
That's a fair point - and indeed I like those projects, not not just for finding good dependencies. I don't actually use that many external libs - but it's basically a version of "Show HN".
The projects can have interesting code to read or just show off a cool idea or a different way of implementing something than I'm used to.
Talking about search: Our company uses GitHub enterprise. We have 1000+ repositories, each repo for a serverless function. Github's search is pathetically broken, I had to download all 1000 repositories in my Mac and search for a dependencies via Vscode. Surprisingly Vscode is blazing fast.
I use sourcegraph[0] for most of my searches even on non-entreprise github to work around how broken github search is. Sourcegraph has the ability to search in forks, in a specific commit, or in a set of repos that you define. It's really quite good at doing github-wide searches of arbitrary query. I'm pretty sure its self-hosted solution can be made to work with github entreprise, you might want to check it out :).
1000 repos seems a bit much. Does it mean that when developing a feature you have to change code in tens of repositories And then create separate commits and PRs for each of those? It just seems way too microscopic.
Well, I wrote a couple projects that gained a couple hundred (and thousand) stars. I've made the front page of Hackernews three or four times. I've been featured on HackaDay and I've been spoken about on Linux Gaming Podcast. I have received cryptic Russian emails, and I have had blogs written about my work. The thrill I got from the attention was huge. I felt validated to no end, and my "collection of stars" has sent recruiters haywire. I landed my most recent job with my github portfolio.
But that's just it. It's a bit of limelight. I'm thankful for the interest I've received, but that's all it is, really; it's validation from fellow programmers. It furthers your career in one or two aspects, just like Instagram fuels your self image, or prospects of influencing. But like Instagram, one can chase the limelight their whole life. Ego stroking is addictive. I urge those who come into a bit of limelight to enjoy it, but to stay humble and focus on delivering what you set out to do, not to bask in your temporory moment of glory.
Then you are using the wrong tools. I still remember the first time I got to use a drill press. I totally could have drilled holes in stuff all day. Two thumbs up, would drill again!.
I'd argue, it _is_ fun to use a well-made tool. As opposed to using an ok tool that just does the job. For example, Fossil SCM as mentioned on HN few times.
GitHub is a well-designed tool for multiple use cases. One aspect was the 'Social Programming' as they were marketing it back then. Trending, stars, fork counts were feeding into that aspect. Even the Issue tracker is a kinda social feature.
I find GitHub as a tool is still a fun/joy/handy to use...if only they fixed the odd bug in mobile view that requires me to refresh several times before it loads the styling files.
He's just specifically talking about the "trending" list though, right? Sure, source control is just a tool, but an internet score board showing you new open source projects? That sounds like fun, to me! Showing you things that are inspiring and interesting is part of the functionality.
Yup, but there's waaaaay too much variety in software development to make this work for all disciplines and languages, so I will bet that it has always been optimized for JS/Full Stack.
I'm an Apple native developer. We aren't usually high on anyone's list.
No, GitHub has some aspects that make it very useful for me. It's the de facto standard for sharing code, or presenting a portfolio.
It also has a great API, and people have written some nice tools for it. The API is probably not unique (or even the best one), but it is well-supported by third parties.
You're doing the thing you love most in all the world, surrounded by people who feel the same way.
You've gotten every perk known to man from ping pong to free booze.
You're getting paid handsomely, more than any other humans on the planet.
You've created a buffer zone between yourself and the client that could withstand a rocket blast from a scud missile
And you are allowed to wear whatever adolescent threads you choose up to and including socks, sandals cargo shorts and a spiderman T shirt ..
Yet you're not having fun and you still call it a job?
CydeWays honestly what more could anyone wish for? Isn't it enough that you've bucked every professional convention? Aren't you satisfied with the greatest free lunch in the history of human enterprise?
Could it be that all these enticements are what's actually robbing you of the fun you so certainly deserve?
Who knows maybe I've read one too many Aesop's fables.
I think your list applies to a select few software engineers in Silicon Valley.
> You're doing the thing you love most in all the world, surrounded by people who feel the same way.
The thing I love most is understanding ideas and solving cool problems. Would have stayed in academia if the jobs,job security and money were there. There is plenty of problem solving but it's not an everyday occurrence.
> You've gotten every perk known to man from ping pong to free booze.
Might get some free booze at company events. We have ping pong at our yearly BBQ.
> You're getting paid handsomely, more than any other humans on the planet.
Definitely not true.
> You've created a buffer zone between yourself and the client that could withstand a rocket blast from a scud missile
I'm emailing or on the phone with clients on a weekly basis.
> And you are allowed to wear whatever adolescent threads you choose up to and including socks, sandals cargo shorts and a spiderman T shirt ..
But then again you most likely refuse to dress up for it, amiright?
And you'll throw every prevarication in the book at me as to why dressing up for work isn't necessary.
And I'll tell you that's employee mentality talking.
And you'll say but I'm an engineer.
And I'll say dressing up is fun, for children and adults alike
And you'll say fun has no place at a job.
And try as you might despite all of your engineer's training you won't be able to see there are more than three ways to frame any context.
CydeWays, I like you don't get me wrong.
We go about claiming that we're not saving lives and then we invest our entire existence on this earth towards things that aren't fun? We're going further than not saving lives bro, we're wasting lives.
And what's worse, you wouldn't consider a dress up job to save your career, nor does it strike you odd that there are no dress up jobs to be had.
By now you still haven't noticed that casual culture is a poor substitute for no fun and you're stuck treating your job like a job, so what exactly is the upside?
I feel that GH plays an important role in exactly that (I have been writing open-source software for more than twenty years, but I'm not particularly "notorious." It has never really been one of my goals).
That said, I have never thought about it as the fulcrum for social networking along those lines. I have considered developer communities, like this one, or specialized ones, as places to connect, and GH as a "gallery," where we can send people to view our portfolio, after we have connected, or to "vet" contacts, like employers.
My experience with GH, is that the folks that really generate the most energy, are the JavaScript/Python/Full-Stack communities. I am an Apple software specialist, and there's not really the same energy, in that community, on GH, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I don't see it the same way as JS folks.
Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts).
I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool.
I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of touch” I must be, because I have never considered it to be a social venue or competitive arena.
It’s just a place I keep my code. I’m quite grateful for it.