7 ms·

Were the GitHub devs doing anything before Microsoft bought them? All that comes to mind is Atom. MS seems to have really been a shot in the arm for feature dev

Were the GitHub devs doing anything before Microsoft bought them? All that comes to mind is Atom. MS seems to have really been a shot in the arm for feature development at GH.

xmprt 7y ago
I think it was a combination of that as well as increasing competition from other companies like Gitlab.
tmpz22 7y ago
IIRC they were always making some progress but then they raised money + got acquired and I assumed headcount ballooned at that point which allowed them to focus on non-enterprise facing features more.
pcr910303 7y ago
Well, there was hub[0] back in the day. I also bet there are a load of features that I&you have never heard of, but someone is using them. And, not only adding features is doing something; improving reliability or just maintaining the site, monitoring is also work... So dismissing pre-MS GitHub might not be really appropriate. [0] https://hub.github.com/ https://hub.github.com/
- hultner 7y ago
  I've been using hub heavily until last year (haven't used github much since), so I was a bit surprised to see this as news. Seems like it's basically the same thing as Hub with some updates b ut most of the flows (and a bunch more) I see were already available through hub.
milofeynman 7y ago
There are some really nice features in the PR diff section like line-suggestions. I think that went in before MS but could be wrong. I'm hoping they add multiline suggestions someday. Also the big one for me is their Desktop Client. It has constantly improved and it makes my life easier. It has only gotten better after MS acquisition. They added rebase and merge support recently. I still do stuff from the command line (interactive rebase the most), but the Desktop Client really improves my workflow.
dictum 7y ago
Hm... Features take some time to get to production. The stuff I use/appreciate most launched either before Microsoft acquired them, or shortly after the deal — so its development predates that.
Macha 7y ago
GitHub Enterprise mostly, I guess.
- gnahckire 7y ago
  This is false. GH Enterprise, although the moneymaker, did not have a lot of devs on the project. Source: MS employee now works at GitHub
dhagz 7y ago
My understanding from listening to employees on podcasts and such was that GitHub had a lot of technical debt (old Rails versions, hacks on old Rails versions to get features in newer Rails versions, etc) that they were whittling down going into - and shortly after - the MS acquisition.
bhl 7y ago
I was recently looking into CRDTs for text-editing, and was surprised to see that Github devs were working on an experimental text editor (Xray) [1] along with a finer-grained version control system for real-time collaborative editing (Memo) [2]. That project, however, seems to have been lost (and archived) in the Microsoft reshuffling of things. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16525735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16525735 [2] https://github.com/atom-archive/xray/tree/master/memo_core https://github.com/atom-archive/xray/tree/master/memo_core
- anchpop 7y ago
  Memo is really cool, I'm sad it seems to not be worked on anymore.
- vmchale 7y ago
  Wonderful! Was that the fruit of your searches? It seems like an interesting topic.
  - bhl 7y ago
    There are other libraries that I've found and used, Yjs [1] for an example because it supports the text editor (ProseMirror) I'm building upon. However, a good version control system for CRDTs, like git for flat text, does not still exist. [1] http://yjs.dev/ http://yjs.dev/
- touisteur 7y ago
  Yeah github seemed to also have some interesting innovations working with in the (programming) language classification domain. There has been some work done by people from the ML@B over at Berkeley (?) to greatly improve github-linguist, the tool GitHub uses (I think) to identify programming languages in GitHub repositories. The project is named lexicon (used to be hosted at https://lexicon.github.io/ https://lexicon.github.io/ but now it 404s...) and the results seemed very interesting. Tried pinging github support about open-sourcing this work, but it seems it's not going to happen. I had very friendly and helpful people answering me, and I totally understand not wanting to open-source something. I just feel a bit sad for the lost opportunity.
Rapzid 7y ago
Heh, TravisCI got acquired and laid off a bunch of staff but at least externally appear to have increased their velocity. CircleCI has raised 115M, hire the best people, and are struggling to release a half-baked UI remake that has been in progress for seemingly ever(that is now being forced on everyone this quarter supposedly). Not sure what the take away is.. Hard to make sense of it externally; interesting things going on under the surface perhaps.
- SkyPuncher 7y ago
  Don't forget CircleCI 1.0 to 2.0 forced migration. We made the switch, but quickly looked at other options. I can't have a vendor willingly introduce major, breaking changes.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  CircleCI's UI is absolutely awful, and the new one isn't much better as it's one of those SPAs that's slow as an old pig and takes ages to load the first time.
  - Rapzid 7y ago
    There are things I like and dislike about the current UI; most of my dislikes revolving around navigating between workflows and projects(am I on a job? a workflow? how do I get back to this projects workflows?). I think most of their UI issues could have been resolved without a complete re-write. Well, I also dislike they stopped fixing certain bugs in it because they are "totally focused" on the new UI; I have to use it in FireFox now because Chrome hangs. Given a re-write though, I think the way it's moved forward is a bit of a train wreck: * It's incomplete information wise. * They threw the baby out with the bathwater as far as UX. Nice things like when you visit a job with failed tests it high-lights that fact and failures; gone. * They implemented the new log viewer with a virtual scroller. Browser search can search into it, and it has no integrated search. You can select past the buffer size of course. Zero extra value to the user here. * It seems like the people working on the project have little product empathy. I would almost think it's been outsourced. When very obvious missing feature or issues(compared to the current UI) are pointed out, we get platitudes like "Thanks for letting us know as we iterate on this. We are all in this together!". * Supposedly it's now being forced on the user base Q1 2020 in this state. * As a nit, it's uninspired and ugly as sin IMHO from a design standpoint. It looks like an off-the-shelf Atlassian SPA theme. And janky. Somehow the sidebar got wider AND dropped the test explaining the icons?! The whole thing seems like a boondoggle of epic proportions. Did I mention they seem to also be simultaneously rolling out GraphQL; because GraphQL?! I'm somewhat surprised and saddened there aren't more people pushing back on it and leaving feedback in their forums. Meanwhile we can't filter entire workflows, and we can't filter for PRs. Sigh. I do like many aspects of their service, so it's a shame to see something play out like this :/
m0zg 7y ago
That's how startups work pre-acquisition. Your acquisition price is dependent in part on how "large" the company is, that is, how many employees you have. So the companies start out small, hiring only the folks who know what they're doing, but as time progresses and they start thinking about selling themselves, they hire a bunch of people who have no clue whatsoever, just to pad the numbers. Surely a 500-person company is worth more to the acquirer than a 50 person one, even if those people just slow the core team down to a crawl. Or at least that's the idea. MS itself isn't really a paragon of productivity, so the visible improvement in productivity is quite telling.
cool-RR 7y ago
Yes, they were building an amazing product with top-of-the-line UX that any other company could only dream of building.
- rkuykendall-com 7y ago
  People completely ignore/don't notice the incredible polish features Github was releasing all the time. They feel them, but they don't actively notice them.
davidcsally 7y ago
My 2cents but I have noticed lots of small, minor updates to their front end over the last year. Things like better focus and hover states, branch copying, better mobile layouts, etc. Lots of minor front end polish.
- captn3m0 7y ago
  That was an explicit paper cuts project by the GitHub team started prior to the acquisition. Primary push was the Dear GitHub letter and the isaacs/GitHub repo which documented hundreds of such small issues. Also, the GitHub refined plugin, features of which GitHub keeps reimplementing now.
qntmfred 7y ago
the Dear GitHub era was a long time ago. they used to be super stale. made a lot of improvements over the last few years imo
echelon 7y ago
They were doing 3D object diff tools [0] and the like. Prior to Microsoft, it seems that the devs had free reign to develop whatever features they wanted, completely undirected by any sense of product management. We stopped using their enterprise product (which they shipped as an obfuscated ruby blob) because they wouldn't listen to us and help us with the problems we were having. [0] https://github.blog/2013-09-17-3d-file-diffs/ https://github.blog/2013-09-17-3d-file-diffs/
- TheCabin 7y ago
  Not the point, I know, but the 3D diff is pretty cool actually :)
koffiezet 7y ago
It's probably also due to the fact that many devs inside Microsoft also use GitHub actively for larger projects. To me this largely looks like they're actively listening to their own developers, or have a structure in place to allow devs to take the initiative to address the needs they're facing. But I have zero insight in how MS works internally, so I can only guess :)

Were the GitHub devs doing anything before Microsoft bought them? All that comes to mind is Atom. MS seems to have really been a shot in the arm for feature development at GH.

xmprt 7y ago

I think it was a combination of that as well as increasing competition from other companies like Gitlab.

tmpz22 7y ago

IIRC they were always making some progress but then they raised money + got acquired and I assumed headcount ballooned at that point which allowed them to focus on non-enterprise facing features more.

pcr910303 7y ago

Well, there was hub[0] back in the day. I also bet there are a load of features that I&you have never heard of, but someone is using them. And, not only adding features is doing something; improving reliability or just maintaining the site, monitoring is also work... So dismissing pre-MS GitHub might not be really appropriate. [0] https://hub.github.com/ https://hub.github.com/

hultner 7y ago
I've been using hub heavily until last year (haven't used github much since), so I was a bit surprised to see this as news. Seems like it's basically the same thing as Hub with some updates b ut most of the flows (and a bunch more) I see were already available through hub.

milofeynman 7y ago

There are some really nice features in the PR diff section like line-suggestions. I think that went in before MS but could be wrong. I'm hoping they add multiline suggestions someday. Also the big one for me is their Desktop Client. It has constantly improved and it makes my life easier. It has only gotten better after MS acquisition. They added rebase and merge support recently. I still do stuff from the command line (interactive rebase the most), but the Desktop Client really improves my workflow.

dictum 7y ago

Hm... Features take some time to get to production. The stuff I use/appreciate most launched either before Microsoft acquired them, or shortly after the deal — so its development predates that.

Macha 7y ago

GitHub Enterprise mostly, I guess.

gnahckire 7y ago
This is false. GH Enterprise, although the moneymaker, did not have a lot of devs on the project. Source: MS employee now works at GitHub

dhagz 7y ago

My understanding from listening to employees on podcasts and such was that GitHub had a lot of technical debt (old Rails versions, hacks on old Rails versions to get features in newer Rails versions, etc) that they were whittling down going into - and shortly after - the MS acquisition.

bhl 7y ago

I was recently looking into CRDTs for text-editing, and was surprised to see that Github devs were working on an experimental text editor (Xray) [1] along with a finer-grained version control system for real-time collaborative editing (Memo) [2]. That project, however, seems to have been lost (and archived) in the Microsoft reshuffling of things. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16525735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16525735 [2] https://github.com/atom-archive/xray/tree/master/memo_core https://github.com/atom-archive/xray/tree/master/memo_core

anchpop 7y ago
Memo is really cool, I'm sad it seems to not be worked on anymore.
vmchale 7y ago
Wonderful! Was that the fruit of your searches? It seems like an interesting topic.
- bhl 7y ago
  There are other libraries that I've found and used, Yjs [1] for an example because it supports the text editor (ProseMirror) I'm building upon. However, a good version control system for CRDTs, like git for flat text, does not still exist. [1] http://yjs.dev/ http://yjs.dev/
touisteur 7y ago
Yeah github seemed to also have some interesting innovations working with in the (programming) language classification domain. There has been some work done by people from the ML@B over at Berkeley (?) to greatly improve github-linguist, the tool GitHub uses (I think) to identify programming languages in GitHub repositories. The project is named lexicon (used to be hosted at https://lexicon.github.io/ https://lexicon.github.io/ but now it 404s...) and the results seemed very interesting. Tried pinging github support about open-sourcing this work, but it seems it's not going to happen. I had very friendly and helpful people answering me, and I totally understand not wanting to open-source something. I just feel a bit sad for the lost opportunity.

Rapzid 7y ago

Heh, TravisCI got acquired and laid off a bunch of staff but at least externally appear to have increased their velocity. CircleCI has raised 115M, hire the best people, and are struggling to release a half-baked UI remake that has been in progress for seemingly ever(that is now being forced on everyone this quarter supposedly). Not sure what the take away is.. Hard to make sense of it externally; interesting things going on under the surface perhaps.

SkyPuncher 7y ago
Don't forget CircleCI 1.0 to 2.0 forced migration. We made the switch, but quickly looked at other options. I can't have a vendor willingly introduce major, breaking changes.
Nextgrid 7y ago
CircleCI's UI is absolutely awful, and the new one isn't much better as it's one of those SPAs that's slow as an old pig and takes ages to load the first time.
- Rapzid 7y ago
  There are things I like and dislike about the current UI; most of my dislikes revolving around navigating between workflows and projects(am I on a job? a workflow? how do I get back to this projects workflows?). I think most of their UI issues could have been resolved without a complete re-write. Well, I also dislike they stopped fixing certain bugs in it because they are "totally focused" on the new UI; I have to use it in FireFox now because Chrome hangs. Given a re-write though, I think the way it's moved forward is a bit of a train wreck: * It's incomplete information wise. * They threw the baby out with the bathwater as far as UX. Nice things like when you visit a job with failed tests it high-lights that fact and failures; gone. * They implemented the new log viewer with a virtual scroller. Browser search can search into it, and it has no integrated search. You can select past the buffer size of course. Zero extra value to the user here. * It seems like the people working on the project have little product empathy. I would almost think it's been outsourced. When very obvious missing feature or issues(compared to the current UI) are pointed out, we get platitudes like "Thanks for letting us know as we iterate on this. We are all in this together!". * Supposedly it's now being forced on the user base Q1 2020 in this state. * As a nit, it's uninspired and ugly as sin IMHO from a design standpoint. It looks like an off-the-shelf Atlassian SPA theme. And janky. Somehow the sidebar got wider AND dropped the test explaining the icons?! The whole thing seems like a boondoggle of epic proportions. Did I mention they seem to also be simultaneously rolling out GraphQL; because GraphQL?! I'm somewhat surprised and saddened there aren't more people pushing back on it and leaving feedback in their forums. Meanwhile we can't filter entire workflows, and we can't filter for PRs. Sigh. I do like many aspects of their service, so it's a shame to see something play out like this :/

m0zg 7y ago

That's how startups work pre-acquisition. Your acquisition price is dependent in part on how "large" the company is, that is, how many employees you have. So the companies start out small, hiring only the folks who know what they're doing, but as time progresses and they start thinking about selling themselves, they hire a bunch of people who have no clue whatsoever, just to pad the numbers. Surely a 500-person company is worth more to the acquirer than a 50 person one, even if those people just slow the core team down to a crawl. Or at least that's the idea. MS itself isn't really a paragon of productivity, so the visible improvement in productivity is quite telling.

cool-RR 7y ago

Yes, they were building an amazing product with top-of-the-line UX that any other company could only dream of building.

rkuykendall-com 7y ago
People completely ignore/don't notice the incredible polish features Github was releasing all the time. They feel them, but they don't actively notice them.

davidcsally 7y ago

My 2cents but I have noticed lots of small, minor updates to their front end over the last year. Things like better focus and hover states, branch copying, better mobile layouts, etc. Lots of minor front end polish.

captn3m0 7y ago
That was an explicit paper cuts project by the GitHub team started prior to the acquisition. Primary push was the Dear GitHub letter and the isaacs/GitHub repo which documented hundreds of such small issues. Also, the GitHub refined plugin, features of which GitHub keeps reimplementing now.

qntmfred 7y ago

the Dear GitHub era was a long time ago. they used to be super stale. made a lot of improvements over the last few years imo

echelon 7y ago

They were doing 3D object diff tools [0] and the like. Prior to Microsoft, it seems that the devs had free reign to develop whatever features they wanted, completely undirected by any sense of product management. We stopped using their enterprise product (which they shipped as an obfuscated ruby blob) because they wouldn't listen to us and help us with the problems we were having. [0] https://github.blog/2013-09-17-3d-file-diffs/ https://github.blog/2013-09-17-3d-file-diffs/

TheCabin 7y ago
Not the point, I know, but the 3D diff is pretty cool actually :)

koffiezet 7y ago

It's probably also due to the fact that many devs inside Microsoft also use GitHub actively for larger projects. To me this largely looks like they're actively listening to their own developers, or have a structure in place to allow devs to take the initiative to address the needs they're facing. But I have zero insight in how MS works internally, so I can only guess :)