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Hi, I'm Shiloh, the guy that made the original reddit post and medium article. After reading some comments, I clarified my statement on GitHub's role in the CS

Hi, I'm Shiloh, the guy that made the original reddit post and medium article. After reading some comments, I clarified my statement on GitHub's role in the CS industry

toastal 4y ago
Training our next generation on proprietary tools like GitHub isn't the way though. Understanding a VCS (i.e. Git, Mercurial, darcs, Pijul, etc.) is great skill and almost certainly a job requirement, but a specific platform? Its classification as “industry standard” could and should be debated as well.
- peterkelly 4y ago
  The skills you have to learn in order to use github effectively are pretty generic in nature and easily transferable to other platforms.
  - toastal 4y ago
    Is that why most people don't know stack-based Git flows or how to using send-email? GitHub only really works on the pull request model which is not the only way to use Git. There are pros and cons to these workflows, but if skills are generic, then you can just say "Git" or "Git forge" without needing to specify a platform.
    - antihero 4y ago
      Most major platforms use pull/merge requests.
      - toastal 4y ago
        PostgreSQL uses a mailing list and Google uses Gerrit to name two "major" counters. There are plenty of big projects and orgs operating under different models.
        antihero 4y ago
        I'm talking about stuff like Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. What I am saying is that most of the paradigms that GitHub has have familiar if slightly different implementations in other places.
        toastal 4y ago
        But they aren't the only ones, nor the only ways. It's not necessary to know other paradigms, but knowing of their existence is nice, but also they should never be discounted as lesser methods of doing source hosting and code review--especially when used by large orgs and projects.
    - noirscape 4y ago
      send-email/stack is very niche in use from my experience. Only the Linux kernel and SourceHut really make heavy use of it (and from what I've heard, SourceHut is also looking into at least giving developers the option to not need to use send-email, but no clue how far that is). The reality is that tools like send-email just... don't really work under the current email oligopoly (since the big providers both heavily filter emails and generally consider IMAP to be insecure). That entire model dates back to the days where email accounts mostly were tied to universities and as a result an emails name had a lot more meaning. Heck, even for the kernel, send-mail is starting to fall out of practice because it just renders like shit in most email clients. It's a rather dated model. The pull request flow is the de-facto industry standard, basically all but the oldest git-based projects use it. Not all are on GitHub (since it's proprietary or just straight up issues with GitHub as a company), but even when they aren't, self-hosted git servers like gitea and gitlab are both still using that exact flow. The examples where this isn't the case are generally rare enough that they're worth more learning as a procedure for that project than as an easily transferrable skill.
- vertis 4y ago
  GitHub is to Git what Excel is to a CSV file. It's not realistic to suggest people avoid GitHub with the kind of market dominance that GitHub has. I while I empathise with the sentiment learning GitHub is absolutely a tool that will help them get jobs in a way that Git alone won't.
  - toastal 4y ago
    That's precisely the thing we should avoid. Learning on free software like LibreOffice Calc would be better just like learning GIMP would be better than students learning Adobe Photoshop and demanding employers buy these licenses/subscriptions. You can self-host Git, but there's also plenty of alternatives that are built as free software.
    - themoonisachees 4y ago
      You are fooling yourself if you think libreoffice has feature parity with ms office, and gimp with Photoshop. Gimp doesn't even have feature parity with krita.
      - toastal 4y ago
        And Krita doesn't hold a candle to darktable for working with photography on RAW images. So? The point is that the basic features a students need to know will be covered by free software or there will be an alternative that does. Having feature parity isn't important if copying another software isn't a goal--versus just making something good. How many advanced GitHub features not present on other platforms do you think students are using? If the answer is none, then there's no reason to choose a proprietary service they can't hack on and are required create accounts with a for-profit entity.
        vertis 4y ago
        I notice from your blog that you have links to a number of commercial services including Keybase. Keybase is another really great example of the disconnect between the underlying open source (GPG, etc) and something that is easily approachable and just lets people get on with the things they want to do. We shouldn't use Keybase, but the nearest alternative open-source, Keyoxide, is not functional unless you're an engineer. Keybase on the other hand is perfectly usable without being an expert in the underlying cryptography. Similarly Github has a huge number of features that a usable by people that aren't developers (PRs etc). If you want a point to your side, GIMP is a bad hill to die on. Blender is a much better example of a tool that we should be teaching as opposed to Autodesk Maya (etc). That's the thing with Blender though, it has feature parity with the things it's competing with and a community and network effect. For something open source to compete with GitHub it would need to be so much more than Git and offer the community and discovery that forms a big part of the "open" GitHub. In the meantime people need to get things done. NOT teaching them the tool they're inevitably going to use is just a pointless battle to fight. Better to create the alternative first and lure people with straight up feature benefits.
- boxed 4y ago
  What you say is 100% true. And also 100% irrelevant to the topic at hand. The latter is the problem.
  - toastal 4y ago
    It's relevant. The article has a sarcastic section asserting that GitHub is an industry standard and job requirement. What I don't like seeing is a new generation thinking DVCS implies Microsoft GitHub.
    - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
      > What I don't like seeing is a new generation thinking DVCS implies Microsoft GitHub It does. GitHub won. Git and GitHub are synonymous now.
      - toastal 4y ago
        No it's not. Every time they have an outage more folks jump to other Git hosting alternatives. The biggest free software projects like Freedesktop, GNOME, KDE, are all self-hosting GitLab. Folks concerned with their data and the idea of US sanctions and corporate control look at projects like Codeberg. and Folks tired of slow UIs and ‘social’ moved to SourceHut and cgit. The thing that keeps replenishing the proprietary platform is new developers being told they need to put their projects on Microsoft GitHub. Arguing decentralized version control, like Git, should have a centralized home is antithetical to the tool.
pedrow 4y ago
This must be really disappointing for you - I think most people would agree you didn't break the 'spirit' of the rules even if you did maybe break the letter of the rules. It would be great if you could re-draft that clause in a way which makes sense, and then get back to your teacher to see if she can influence the competition organisers. That way, next year's competition will be just a little fairer.
spiffytech 4y ago
Your project is prettier than most commercial sites I've seen, and prettier than anything I've built after nearly two decades in the industry. I noticed the more prominent "Purchase" color on the upsell plan. That either means you went above and beyond on your design research, or have better instincts than many founders. Good work! Keep it up and you'll really go places.
didntreadarticl 4y ago
Hi Shiloh, as a consolation for the competition, what sites can HNers follow you and your team-mates on? Do you have a twitter for tech stuff?

Hi, I'm Shiloh, the guy that made the original reddit post and medium article. After reading some comments, I clarified my statement on GitHub's role in the CS industry

toastal 4y ago

Training our next generation on proprietary tools like GitHub isn't the way though. Understanding a VCS (i.e. Git, Mercurial, darcs, Pijul, etc.) is great skill and almost certainly a job requirement, but a specific platform? Its classification as “industry standard” could and should be debated as well.

peterkelly 4y ago
The skills you have to learn in order to use github effectively are pretty generic in nature and easily transferable to other platforms.
- toastal 4y ago
  Is that why most people don't know stack-based Git flows or how to using send-email? GitHub only really works on the pull request model which is not the only way to use Git. There are pros and cons to these workflows, but if skills are generic, then you can just say "Git" or "Git forge" without needing to specify a platform.
  - antihero 4y ago
    Most major platforms use pull/merge requests.
    - toastal 4y ago
      PostgreSQL uses a mailing list and Google uses Gerrit to name two "major" counters. There are plenty of big projects and orgs operating under different models.
      - antihero 4y ago
        I'm talking about stuff like Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. What I am saying is that most of the paradigms that GitHub has have familiar if slightly different implementations in other places.
        toastal 4y ago
        But they aren't the only ones, nor the only ways. It's not necessary to know other paradigms, but knowing of their existence is nice, but also they should never be discounted as lesser methods of doing source hosting and code review--especially when used by large orgs and projects.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    send-email/stack is very niche in use from my experience. Only the Linux kernel and SourceHut really make heavy use of it (and from what I've heard, SourceHut is also looking into at least giving developers the option to not need to use send-email, but no clue how far that is). The reality is that tools like send-email just... don't really work under the current email oligopoly (since the big providers both heavily filter emails and generally consider IMAP to be insecure). That entire model dates back to the days where email accounts mostly were tied to universities and as a result an emails name had a lot more meaning. Heck, even for the kernel, send-mail is starting to fall out of practice because it just renders like shit in most email clients. It's a rather dated model. The pull request flow is the de-facto industry standard, basically all but the oldest git-based projects use it. Not all are on GitHub (since it's proprietary or just straight up issues with GitHub as a company), but even when they aren't, self-hosted git servers like gitea and gitlab are both still using that exact flow. The examples where this isn't the case are generally rare enough that they're worth more learning as a procedure for that project than as an easily transferrable skill.
vertis 4y ago
GitHub is to Git what Excel is to a CSV file. It's not realistic to suggest people avoid GitHub with the kind of market dominance that GitHub has. I while I empathise with the sentiment learning GitHub is absolutely a tool that will help them get jobs in a way that Git alone won't.
- toastal 4y ago
  That's precisely the thing we should avoid. Learning on free software like LibreOffice Calc would be better just like learning GIMP would be better than students learning Adobe Photoshop and demanding employers buy these licenses/subscriptions. You can self-host Git, but there's also plenty of alternatives that are built as free software.
  - themoonisachees 4y ago
    You are fooling yourself if you think libreoffice has feature parity with ms office, and gimp with Photoshop. Gimp doesn't even have feature parity with krita.
    - toastal 4y ago
      And Krita doesn't hold a candle to darktable for working with photography on RAW images. So? The point is that the basic features a students need to know will be covered by free software or there will be an alternative that does. Having feature parity isn't important if copying another software isn't a goal--versus just making something good. How many advanced GitHub features not present on other platforms do you think students are using? If the answer is none, then there's no reason to choose a proprietary service they can't hack on and are required create accounts with a for-profit entity.
      - vertis 4y ago
        I notice from your blog that you have links to a number of commercial services including Keybase. Keybase is another really great example of the disconnect between the underlying open source (GPG, etc) and something that is easily approachable and just lets people get on with the things they want to do. We shouldn't use Keybase, but the nearest alternative open-source, Keyoxide, is not functional unless you're an engineer. Keybase on the other hand is perfectly usable without being an expert in the underlying cryptography. Similarly Github has a huge number of features that a usable by people that aren't developers (PRs etc). If you want a point to your side, GIMP is a bad hill to die on. Blender is a much better example of a tool that we should be teaching as opposed to Autodesk Maya (etc). That's the thing with Blender though, it has feature parity with the things it's competing with and a community and network effect. For something open source to compete with GitHub it would need to be so much more than Git and offer the community and discovery that forms a big part of the "open" GitHub. In the meantime people need to get things done. NOT teaching them the tool they're inevitably going to use is just a pointless battle to fight. Better to create the alternative first and lure people with straight up feature benefits.
boxed 4y ago
What you say is 100% true. And also 100% irrelevant to the topic at hand. The latter is the problem.
- toastal 4y ago
  It's relevant. The article has a sarcastic section asserting that GitHub is an industry standard and job requirement. What I don't like seeing is a new generation thinking DVCS implies Microsoft GitHub.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    > What I don't like seeing is a new generation thinking DVCS implies Microsoft GitHub It does. GitHub won. Git and GitHub are synonymous now.
    - toastal 4y ago
      No it's not. Every time they have an outage more folks jump to other Git hosting alternatives. The biggest free software projects like Freedesktop, GNOME, KDE, are all self-hosting GitLab. Folks concerned with their data and the idea of US sanctions and corporate control look at projects like Codeberg. and Folks tired of slow UIs and ‘social’ moved to SourceHut and cgit. The thing that keeps replenishing the proprietary platform is new developers being told they need to put their projects on Microsoft GitHub. Arguing decentralized version control, like Git, should have a centralized home is antithetical to the tool.

pedrow 4y ago

This must be really disappointing for you - I think most people would agree you didn't break the 'spirit' of the rules even if you did maybe break the letter of the rules. It would be great if you could re-draft that clause in a way which makes sense, and then get back to your teacher to see if she can influence the competition organisers. That way, next year's competition will be just a little fairer.

spiffytech 4y ago

Your project is prettier than most commercial sites I've seen, and prettier than anything I've built after nearly two decades in the industry. I noticed the more prominent "Purchase" color on the upsell plan. That either means you went above and beyond on your design research, or have better instincts than many founders. Good work! Keep it up and you'll really go places.

didntreadarticl 4y ago

Hi Shiloh, as a consolation for the competition, what sites can HNers follow you and your team-mates on? Do you have a twitter for tech stuff?