10 ms·

Github For Everything

100 points by hunvreus 13y ago

vincentkriek 13y ago
Although it's nice that everything is in one place I don't think Github would be my first choice. It's made primarily for managing code and everything surrounding that. I do think the issue tracking translates very well over to "real life" issues. Why are the legal documents not on GitHub though? That would be perfect for github.
- hunvreus 13y ago
  We've actually stored legal documents on Github in the past (think contracts, proposals, employee handbook, invoices...) as Markdown files. It felt very strange though to collaborate around files through Git. The `PULL > COMMIT > PUSH` workflow works well for a lot of things, not necessarily well when you're preparing a contract. We've actually built a tool around Dropbox for that very use case. Happy to share it here when it's ready end of this month.
  - evolve2k 13y ago
    I actually imagine github would work quite well for this if office users edited directly from the github website.
  - gcv 13y ago
    You made your non-tech staff write Markdown files? How did that go? Also, about contracts — .doc/.docx is lingua franca. How did you deal with collaborating with the rest of the world?
    - hunvreus 13y ago
      1. We wrote a WYSIWYG for Markdown (https://github.com/Wiredcraft/Moleskin https://github.com/Wiredcraft/Moleskin). Also, everybody learns Markdown at Wiredcraft. 2. Actually, the standard would be PDF for legal documents (never understood why people send you a contract in a format that is easily editable). The tool we're currently building allows you to use our WYSIWYG to collaboratively edit documents online while keeping Markdown in the backend.
      - icebraining 13y ago
        never understood why people send you a contract in a format that is easily editable All formats are easily editable; contracts should be digitally signed to prevent shenanigans.
      - gcv 13y ago
        The final version of a contract is certainly PDF, but during negotiations, people must be able to make and track edits. Git has these features covered, but I just can't imagine sending a Markdown contract draft file marked "FOR DISCUSSION ONLY, NOT INTENDED AS A BINDING CONTRACT" to a typical counterparty. I guess that your WYSIWYG editor might do the trick — it depends on the extent to which your counterparties rely on MS Office tools.
  - kaeawc 13y ago
    Please do share, would be interested to see it.
kassner 13y ago
It great, but I concern about exporting data out from GitHub for whatever a reason. Is there a backup anything or we just have to dig data out from API?
- thomaslangston 13y ago
  Every repo can be cloned down as normal. ~~I'm not certain about the issue tracking.~~ Edit: according to a quick Google search issues can be exported in JSON format.
- hunvreus 13y ago
  Issues are disposable data, it has an expiration date. Once you closed an issue, there's little value in it. Most of the valuable data ends up in the Wiki (or in code), and Wikis are actually Git repositories. You can't make it easier to backup. Wanna try it? Take any repository, for example Hubot: https://github.com/github/hubot https://github.com/github/hubot. Now go ahead and run: git clone https://github.com/github/hubot.wiki.git https://github.com/github/hubot.wiki.git
  - kassner 13y ago
    I didn't know the ".wiki" notation for downloading it. Thanks!
  - kassner 13y ago
    Issues are an important part of a product/library that is evolving. If you loose an edge case bug, you could take months to face it again.
  - bergie 13y ago
    You could also use the GitHub Issue API http://developer.github.com/v3/issues/ http://developer.github.com/v3/issues/ to backup the issue data
dkuebric 13y ago
This isn't what I thought it would be. I think "Github for everything" is something everyone should be looking for in their lives. Version control is useful for so many things. I think the understand this already though. With the release of stuff like 3d diffs now it's the "GitHub of CAD", I could imagine a useful future for the "GitHub of legal documents", "GitHub of _____"....
- __--__ 13y ago
  While I appreciate the sentiment that version control is very useful, I'm loathe to put all of my data in the hands of a US based company again. Went down that road once with Google. Never again. I think "Git for everything" should be the mantra, but I realize the unix philosophy behind git probably makes that unlikely. I think it would be cool to set up a 'github' 'p2p protocol' where if you sign up with one server you can access projects from any other server following the protocol. For example, I run my own 'github' instance just for me on my personal server. A company can host an instance on their servers and, if they implement the protocol, I can use my instance to submit a pull request on a repository they host. Complete interoperability.
  - drdaeman 13y ago
    > I think it would be cool to set up a 'github' 'p2p protocol' I believe that one is called Git, with HTTP or SSH and SMTP as helper transports. (In particular, pull requests are done with `git format-patch` and `git send-email`)
    - icebraining 13y ago
      It lacks the issue tracking, though.
      - kanzure 13y ago
        Bugs Everywhere was an attempt at storing issues and bugs inside the git repository itself. Maintenance activity has been on a down slope for Bugs Everywhere, though..
thomaslangston 13y ago
I expect with a few custom front end UIs, even the poor fits could at least use github as a backing store. This could give other company tools one data layer to inspect.
6cxs2hd6 13y ago
Although maybe this blog post was already in the pipeline, unfortunate juxtaposition with yesterday's GitHub outage. Although I truly do love GitHub, it's not unconditional love. My love's uptime closely tracks GitHub's.
- fuckyoutoo 13y ago
  Your wife wishes github was more reliable.
  - kyzyl 13y ago
    Protip: In almost no circumstances is it a good idea to make comments about someone's spouse. Much less on a professional forum, and certainly not on HN. Regardless of the intent, the potential for misunderstandings, over reactions, and incorrect inferences is great, meanwhile such comments almost never add any meaning to the discussion.
    - ulisesrmzroche 13y ago
      Looks like a throw-away account. Who knows what the dude's problem (cowardice my guess) but he didn't want to take the rep hit.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - VikingCoder 13y ago
      Protip: A user with an account name, "fuckyoutoo" does not care about protips.
      - kyzyl 13y ago
        Yeh. I guess usually when I'm on HN I just respond to people as if they're real, have a brain and not intentionally trying to stir shit up. In this case I didn't even notice the name. Alas, perhaps times have changed around here and I need to start treating people like redditors until proven innocent ;-)
topac 13y ago
Everyone love and use wikipedia but i do not see 10k posts per day saying that wikipedia is the new god.
- solistice 13y ago
  You're just a couple of years late.
davexunit 13y ago
I think depending upon a single, proprietary web service for everything is foolish. When Github is down, you're out of luck. If Github changes in a way you don't like, you're out of luck.
- Goopplesoft 13y ago
  I dont think diversification would do much better. Most big github features are probably handled by separate teams and function somewhat independent of each other as well. But downtime could be a big issue although Github has been generally good at it (https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month) People also rely on github git repos for deployment (e.g. in requirements.txt) so their work would likely survive standard levels of downtime.
- joeblau 13y ago
  GitHub offers and enterprise offering that you can host yourself. It's no better/worse than hosting your own version of JIRA, Confluence, and a git repository. That way you're not 100% dependent on github.com actually being up. As far as changes, you're right, but the changes are true with any product. At my last company, we did a JIRA upgrade which ended up being a nightmare for process because lots of things changed and were configured incorrectly. I guess I'm trying to say that what you're saying is true for any SaaS product you use and doesn't take away from trying to use GitHub, maybe not necessarily github.com, to run everything.
  - davexunit 13y ago
    >As far as changes, you're right, but the changes are true with any product. This is true, but only with proprietary software are they unfixable.
- rohamg 13y ago
  Welcome to the internet! You must be new here :) Jokes aside, using any proprietary web service has the exact same downside. And yet here we all are using Google Apps, Dropbox, GitHub, HipChat, Intercom, and dozens of others. As a team, we found additional web services add exponentially increasing complexity; we eventually needed a platform to keep track of all the platforms we were using. So we back-tracked and went the same route as the Wiredcraft guys, centralizing everything into GitHub. As a community, instead of advocating turning the clock back (which will never happen: the toothpaste has exited the tube), we should explore ways to satisfy security & reliability concerns while maintaining convenience. Also, you can self-host GitHub.
fraserxv 13y ago
Like this way of getting things done. Geeky! I may translate the post into Chinese later.
mck- 13y ago
This is exactly what we do at our team too -- we're developer centric and as developers, we love using Github and Github issues (+ pull-requests) for everything (including PM and HR) One thing we do miss are certain features from Trello-like tools that give a nice overview of your issues and facilitate PM, so we built a Chrome/FF extension to fill in those gaps (http://zenhub.io http://zenhub.io) Disclaimer: I work at Axiom Zen
- dencold 13y ago
  One thing I wish Github would do is allow for a more granular permission structure. It would be fantastic if we could allow people without github accounts do things like submit issues, or allow certain users (e.g. non-technical staff) only have access to the wiki and issue tracker. Right now the permissions are centered around what you can do with repositories, it's very developer-centric. I think there is a lot that GitHub could do here to expand their service to be more applicable to an entire organization.
- hunvreus 13y ago
  We've been using Huboard recently, but I'm definitely in terested in seeing how Zenhub compares to it. How are you guys going to monetize this?
abritishguy 13y ago
Github goes down far too frequently to consider using the non-enterprise version for everything. The realtime collaboration on Google docs is also mega useful for weekly meetings and something that Github's wikis doesn't match.
pearjuice 13y ago
I'm still bracing myself for the Github for Writers; http://madebyloren.com/github-for-writers http://madebyloren.com/github-for-writers
- ideadude 13y ago
  I'm writing a book for O'Reilly and we use their Atlas tool which stores everything in a git repository. Pretty cool, especially for technical books. It's open to the public [oops, I lied. It's private beta] in beta: http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com/ http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com/
breckinloggins 13y ago
Idea: Github should allow "plugin repositories" that can be shared or private. The first iteration would have some way to provide file type viewers. A file under filetype/viewer.js.js would replace github's default JavaScript viewer (itself simply published as a repository that just happens to be the top node). You could start your own customizations by forking that repository. If you develop a viewer/editor/future plugin component that you think the world should use, send it in as a pull request to the canonical repo. The other thing I think github should do is go the JetBrains Upstream / Google Grok (if it ever happens) route and provide syntactic / semantic analysis as a service, from which all these visualizers, editors, and other tools are built.
thefox 13y ago
This idea is awesome. Thanks for sharing! Are your internal wiki, recruitment process, Day-to-day operations, etc. on a private repository? Do you have only one repository or do you have multiple repositories for your internal work?

100 points by hunvreus 13y ago

Although it's nice that everything is in one place I don't think Github would be my first choice. It's made primarily for managing code and everything surrounding that. I do think the issue tracking translates very well over to "real life" issues. Why are the legal documents not on GitHub though? That would be perfect for github.

hunvreus 13y ago
We've actually stored legal documents on Github in the past (think contracts, proposals, employee handbook, invoices...) as Markdown files. It felt very strange though to collaborate around files through Git. The `PULL > COMMIT > PUSH` workflow works well for a lot of things, not necessarily well when you're preparing a contract. We've actually built a tool around Dropbox for that very use case. Happy to share it here when it's ready end of this month.
- evolve2k 13y ago
  I actually imagine github would work quite well for this if office users edited directly from the github website.
- gcv 13y ago
  You made your non-tech staff write Markdown files? How did that go? Also, about contracts — .doc/.docx is lingua franca. How did you deal with collaborating with the rest of the world?
  - hunvreus 13y ago
    1. We wrote a WYSIWYG for Markdown (https://github.com/Wiredcraft/Moleskin https://github.com/Wiredcraft/Moleskin). Also, everybody learns Markdown at Wiredcraft. 2. Actually, the standard would be PDF for legal documents (never understood why people send you a contract in a format that is easily editable). The tool we're currently building allows you to use our WYSIWYG to collaboratively edit documents online while keeping Markdown in the backend.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      never understood why people send you a contract in a format that is easily editable All formats are easily editable; contracts should be digitally signed to prevent shenanigans.
    - gcv 13y ago
      The final version of a contract is certainly PDF, but during negotiations, people must be able to make and track edits. Git has these features covered, but I just can't imagine sending a Markdown contract draft file marked "FOR DISCUSSION ONLY, NOT INTENDED AS A BINDING CONTRACT" to a typical counterparty. I guess that your WYSIWYG editor might do the trick — it depends on the extent to which your counterparties rely on MS Office tools.
- kaeawc 13y ago
  Please do share, would be interested to see it.

kassner 13y ago

It great, but I concern about exporting data out from GitHub for whatever a reason. Is there a backup anything or we just have to dig data out from API?

thomaslangston 13y ago
Every repo can be cloned down as normal. ~~I'm not certain about the issue tracking.~~ Edit: according to a quick Google search issues can be exported in JSON format.
hunvreus 13y ago
Issues are disposable data, it has an expiration date. Once you closed an issue, there's little value in it. Most of the valuable data ends up in the Wiki (or in code), and Wikis are actually Git repositories. You can't make it easier to backup. Wanna try it? Take any repository, for example Hubot: https://github.com/github/hubot https://github.com/github/hubot. Now go ahead and run: git clone https://github.com/github/hubot.wiki.git https://github.com/github/hubot.wiki.git
- kassner 13y ago
  I didn't know the ".wiki" notation for downloading it. Thanks!
- kassner 13y ago
  Issues are an important part of a product/library that is evolving. If you loose an edge case bug, you could take months to face it again.
- bergie 13y ago
  You could also use the GitHub Issue API http://developer.github.com/v3/issues/ http://developer.github.com/v3/issues/ to backup the issue data

dkuebric 13y ago

This isn't what I thought it would be. I think "Github for everything" is something everyone should be looking for in their lives. Version control is useful for so many things. I think the understand this already though. With the release of stuff like 3d diffs now it's the "GitHub of CAD", I could imagine a useful future for the "GitHub of legal documents", "GitHub of _____"....

__--__ 13y ago
While I appreciate the sentiment that version control is very useful, I'm loathe to put all of my data in the hands of a US based company again. Went down that road once with Google. Never again. I think "Git for everything" should be the mantra, but I realize the unix philosophy behind git probably makes that unlikely. I think it would be cool to set up a 'github' 'p2p protocol' where if you sign up with one server you can access projects from any other server following the protocol. For example, I run my own 'github' instance just for me on my personal server. A company can host an instance on their servers and, if they implement the protocol, I can use my instance to submit a pull request on a repository they host. Complete interoperability.
- drdaeman 13y ago
  > I think it would be cool to set up a 'github' 'p2p protocol' I believe that one is called Git, with HTTP or SSH and SMTP as helper transports. (In particular, pull requests are done with `git format-patch` and `git send-email`)
  - icebraining 13y ago
    It lacks the issue tracking, though.
    - kanzure 13y ago
      Bugs Everywhere was an attempt at storing issues and bugs inside the git repository itself. Maintenance activity has been on a down slope for Bugs Everywhere, though..

thomaslangston 13y ago

I expect with a few custom front end UIs, even the poor fits could at least use github as a backing store. This could give other company tools one data layer to inspect.

6cxs2hd6 13y ago

Although maybe this blog post was already in the pipeline, unfortunate juxtaposition with yesterday's GitHub outage. Although I truly do love GitHub, it's not unconditional love. My love's uptime closely tracks GitHub's.

fuckyoutoo 13y ago
Your wife wishes github was more reliable.
- kyzyl 13y ago
  Protip: In almost no circumstances is it a good idea to make comments about someone's spouse. Much less on a professional forum, and certainly not on HN. Regardless of the intent, the potential for misunderstandings, over reactions, and incorrect inferences is great, meanwhile such comments almost never add any meaning to the discussion.
  - ulisesrmzroche 13y ago
    Looks like a throw-away account. Who knows what the dude's problem (cowardice my guess) but he didn't want to take the rep hit.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - VikingCoder 13y ago
    Protip: A user with an account name, "fuckyoutoo" does not care about protips.
    - kyzyl 13y ago
      Yeh. I guess usually when I'm on HN I just respond to people as if they're real, have a brain and not intentionally trying to stir shit up. In this case I didn't even notice the name. Alas, perhaps times have changed around here and I need to start treating people like redditors until proven innocent ;-)

topac 13y ago

Everyone love and use wikipedia but i do not see 10k posts per day saying that wikipedia is the new god.

solistice 13y ago
You're just a couple of years late.

davexunit 13y ago

I think depending upon a single, proprietary web service for everything is foolish. When Github is down, you're out of luck. If Github changes in a way you don't like, you're out of luck.

Goopplesoft 13y ago
I dont think diversification would do much better. Most big github features are probably handled by separate teams and function somewhat independent of each other as well. But downtime could be a big issue although Github has been generally good at it (https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month) People also rely on github git repos for deployment (e.g. in requirements.txt) so their work would likely survive standard levels of downtime.
joeblau 13y ago
GitHub offers and enterprise offering that you can host yourself. It's no better/worse than hosting your own version of JIRA, Confluence, and a git repository. That way you're not 100% dependent on github.com actually being up. As far as changes, you're right, but the changes are true with any product. At my last company, we did a JIRA upgrade which ended up being a nightmare for process because lots of things changed and were configured incorrectly. I guess I'm trying to say that what you're saying is true for any SaaS product you use and doesn't take away from trying to use GitHub, maybe not necessarily github.com, to run everything.
- davexunit 13y ago
  >As far as changes, you're right, but the changes are true with any product. This is true, but only with proprietary software are they unfixable.
rohamg 13y ago
Welcome to the internet! You must be new here :) Jokes aside, using any proprietary web service has the exact same downside. And yet here we all are using Google Apps, Dropbox, GitHub, HipChat, Intercom, and dozens of others. As a team, we found additional web services add exponentially increasing complexity; we eventually needed a platform to keep track of all the platforms we were using. So we back-tracked and went the same route as the Wiredcraft guys, centralizing everything into GitHub. As a community, instead of advocating turning the clock back (which will never happen: the toothpaste has exited the tube), we should explore ways to satisfy security & reliability concerns while maintaining convenience. Also, you can self-host GitHub.

fraserxv 13y ago

Like this way of getting things done. Geeky! I may translate the post into Chinese later.

mck- 13y ago

This is exactly what we do at our team too -- we're developer centric and as developers, we love using Github and Github issues (+ pull-requests) for everything (including PM and HR) One thing we do miss are certain features from Trello-like tools that give a nice overview of your issues and facilitate PM, so we built a Chrome/FF extension to fill in those gaps (http://zenhub.io http://zenhub.io) Disclaimer: I work at Axiom Zen

dencold 13y ago
One thing I wish Github would do is allow for a more granular permission structure. It would be fantastic if we could allow people without github accounts do things like submit issues, or allow certain users (e.g. non-technical staff) only have access to the wiki and issue tracker. Right now the permissions are centered around what you can do with repositories, it's very developer-centric. I think there is a lot that GitHub could do here to expand their service to be more applicable to an entire organization.
hunvreus 13y ago
We've been using Huboard recently, but I'm definitely in terested in seeing how Zenhub compares to it. How are you guys going to monetize this?

abritishguy 13y ago

Github goes down far too frequently to consider using the non-enterprise version for everything. The realtime collaboration on Google docs is also mega useful for weekly meetings and something that Github's wikis doesn't match.

pearjuice 13y ago

I'm still bracing myself for the Github for Writers; http://madebyloren.com/github-for-writers http://madebyloren.com/github-for-writers

ideadude 13y ago
I'm writing a book for O'Reilly and we use their Atlas tool which stores everything in a git repository. Pretty cool, especially for technical books. It's open to the public [oops, I lied. It's private beta] in beta: http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com/ http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com/

breckinloggins 13y ago

Idea: Github should allow "plugin repositories" that can be shared or private. The first iteration would have some way to provide file type viewers. A file under filetype/viewer.js.js would replace github's default JavaScript viewer (itself simply published as a repository that just happens to be the top node). You could start your own customizations by forking that repository. If you develop a viewer/editor/future plugin component that you think the world should use, send it in as a pull request to the canonical repo. The other thing I think github should do is go the JetBrains Upstream / Google Grok (if it ever happens) route and provide syntactic / semantic analysis as a service, from which all these visualizers, editors, and other tools are built.

thefox 13y ago

This idea is awesome. Thanks for sharing! Are your internal wiki, recruitment process, Day-to-day operations, etc. on a private repository? Do you have only one repository or do you have multiple repositories for your internal work?