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> Due to low usage of Trending Repositories and Trending Developers, this tab will no longer be available I've never used this tab. (Just opened it for the fir

> Due to low usage of Trending Repositories and Trending Developers, this tab will no longer be available I've never used this tab. (Just opened it for the first time.) It's cool, and I'm disappointed to see it go. BUT: We should spend a minute thinking about the counter argument. Little and unused features can add cruft to a codebase, and significantly impede development. It's possible that hooks for corner cases and features can be so complicated that working around them becomes more burdensome than supporting the important use cases. Case in point: When I was lead on Syncplicity, we had a corner case where a given folder on disk could be in multiple synchronized folders in the cloud. (Long story.) The problem was this corner case made many use cases, in the desktop client, significantly more complicated and bug-prone than needed. (What happens if you have different permissions to the same file?) There was a point where I put my foot down (as lead) and said we couldn't support the corner case anymore. This lead to almost a year of two branches of the product, and daily merge conflicts between both branches. I had to put my foot down again (as lead) and push that we had to ship the version of the product that didn't have the corner case and stop working on two branches. This makes me wonder if Github needs to cut back on corner cases and other little-used features in order to fix some maintainability issues?

baq 4y ago
GitHub has had so many issues this year people lost count, me included. Of course this points to operations/SRE issues. OTOH if a feature not being widely used was grounds for its removal, they should turn excel into a list editor.
danielamitay 4y ago
The main issue is the conflating of usage and value. The persona/user group that consumes the Trending pages are likely users who themselves contribute to open source, and thus are part of a flywheel that drives more code contribution overall. (e.g. how 1% of users post on reddit vs 99% consume) Not all usage is made equally. This scenario reminds me of a funny story posted on HN a while ago: https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock.gmi https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock.gmi (TL;DR; if you take this "usage based" feature removal logic to it's conclusion, a lot of important keys would be removed from computers/keyboards).

baq 4y ago

GitHub has had so many issues this year people lost count, me included. Of course this points to operations/SRE issues. OTOH if a feature not being widely used was grounds for its removal, they should turn excel into a list editor.

danielamitay 4y ago

The main issue is the conflating of usage and value. The persona/user group that consumes the Trending pages are likely users who themselves contribute to open source, and thus are part of a flywheel that drives more code contribution overall. (e.g. how 1% of users post on reddit vs 99% consume) Not all usage is made equally. This scenario reminds me of a funny story posted on HN a while ago: https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock.gmi https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock.gmi (TL;DR; if you take this "usage based" feature removal logic to it's conclusion, a lot of important keys would be removed from computers/keyboards).