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Do you think that focus is gone? Obviously, this comes down to opinion, but honestly: yes. In the case of GitHub, the point where I reached that conclusion wa

Do you think that focus is gone? Obviously, this comes down to opinion, but honestly: yes. In the case of GitHub, the point where I reached that conclusion was when they added built-in enforcement of code review workflows. A feature which I seem to recall they copied more-or-less directly from GitLab... (And I'm not saying it's wrong for everyone. But diversity is nice...)

scrollaway 8y ago
I'm not sure I follow. Do you think improving in other areas means the focus is no longer on the dev? Github, when it came out, was the only platform that even had proper profile pages for developers. They coined the whole "social coding" thing. I find that whenever I interact with other people on the site, I actively look at their profiles, their contributions, etc. An example of a recent-ish feature they added which IMO is a good example of "focus on the dev": Comment authors are tagged as "Owner", "Member", "Contributor" and "First-time contributor" in comment streams.
- stonogo 8y ago
  > Github, when it came out, was the only platform that even had proper profile pages for developers. This turns out not to be the case. Sourceforge had many or all of these features in the early 2000s.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    The same way FTP had all the features of Dropbox before Dropbox was a thing? Usability matters. Sourceforge was atrocious.
    - stonogo 8y ago
      No, it became atrocious. The world moved on and SourceForge did not, which is why superior offerings arrived. And to your first "question", no. It had them in almost exactly the same incarnation as modern sites, but with a UX design language rooted (fatally) in the "best practices" of the web at the time. Unlike all the crazy things you'd have to do around FTP to get it to act like DropBox, SourceForge had the mentioned features built in from the start. It doesn't really win GitHub any prizes to pretend otherwise, so I'm not sure why the pushback against simple facts.
- dasmoth 8y ago
  I'm not sure I follow. Do you think improving in other areas means the focus is no longer on the dev? Yes. There are always trade-offs, especially when you're adding user-facing features as slowly as GitHub [1]. The author tags are one of very few that focus on individual developers. About the only other one I can think of is the option to curate the repositories that appear on your profile page (welcome, but took years of asking...) [1] Which isn't, in itself, a bad thing -- stability is good, and GitHub's launch feature set turns out to be a pretty good match for what I want)
avar 8y ago
The enforcement of those code review workflows is set up on a per-repository basis. So e.g. if you get access to <someorg>/repo you need to go through that, but not in <yourfork>/repo. I guess in some sense you could say it's a focus on organizations, but on the other hand it's a glaring omission of a feature that you could have implemented with a pre-receive hook years before either GitLab or GitHub had it, so it would be strange if they didn't add it.

scrollaway 8y ago

I'm not sure I follow. Do you think improving in other areas means the focus is no longer on the dev? Github, when it came out, was the only platform that even had proper profile pages for developers. They coined the whole "social coding" thing. I find that whenever I interact with other people on the site, I actively look at their profiles, their contributions, etc. An example of a recent-ish feature they added which IMO is a good example of "focus on the dev": Comment authors are tagged as "Owner", "Member", "Contributor" and "First-time contributor" in comment streams.

stonogo 8y ago
> Github, when it came out, was the only platform that even had proper profile pages for developers. This turns out not to be the case. Sourceforge had many or all of these features in the early 2000s.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  The same way FTP had all the features of Dropbox before Dropbox was a thing? Usability matters. Sourceforge was atrocious.
  - stonogo 8y ago
    No, it became atrocious. The world moved on and SourceForge did not, which is why superior offerings arrived. And to your first "question", no. It had them in almost exactly the same incarnation as modern sites, but with a UX design language rooted (fatally) in the "best practices" of the web at the time. Unlike all the crazy things you'd have to do around FTP to get it to act like DropBox, SourceForge had the mentioned features built in from the start. It doesn't really win GitHub any prizes to pretend otherwise, so I'm not sure why the pushback against simple facts.
dasmoth 8y ago
I'm not sure I follow. Do you think improving in other areas means the focus is no longer on the dev? Yes. There are always trade-offs, especially when you're adding user-facing features as slowly as GitHub [1]. The author tags are one of very few that focus on individual developers. About the only other one I can think of is the option to curate the repositories that appear on your profile page (welcome, but took years of asking...) [1] Which isn't, in itself, a bad thing -- stability is good, and GitHub's launch feature set turns out to be a pretty good match for what I want)

avar 8y ago

The enforcement of those code review workflows is set up on a per-repository basis. So e.g. if you get access to <someorg>/repo you need to go through that, but not in <yourfork>/repo. I guess in some sense you could say it's a focus on organizations, but on the other hand it's a glaring omission of a feature that you could have implemented with a pre-receive hook years before either GitLab or GitHub had it, so it would be strange if they didn't add it.