Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention and reprioritise towards actually delivering a product that's at least relatively reliable?
I moved my company over to GH enterprise last year (from AzDO) and I'm considering moving us away to another vendor altogether as a result of the constant partial outages. Things that used to "just work" now are slow in the UI, and GH actions fail to schedule in a reasonable timeframe way more than they ever used to. I enjoy GH copilot as much as the next person, but ultimately I came to GH because I needed a git forge, and I will leave GH if the git forge doesn't work.
I second this. GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works. Even basic functionality like the timeline updating when I push commits is unreliable. The other day I opened a PR diff (not even a particularly large one) and it took fully 15 seconds after the page visually finished loading -- on a $2,000 dev machine -- before any UI elements became clickable. This happened repeatedly.
It is fairly stunning to me that we've come to accept this level of non-functional software as normal.
The trend of "non-functional software" is happening everywhere. See the recent articles about Copilot in Notepad, failing to start because you aren't signed in with your Microsoft Account.
We are in a future that nobody wanted.
Not quite everywhere. There's a common denominator for all of those: Microsoft.
Their business is buying good products and turning them into shit, while wringing every cent they can out of the business. Always has been.
They have a grace period of about 2-4 years after acquisition where interference is minimal. Then it ramps up. How long a product can survive once the interference begins largely depends on how good senior leadership at that product company is at resisting the interference. It's a hopeless battle, the best you can do is to lose slowly.
Things don't always ramp up after 2-4 years. Sometimes MS just kills the project or company after that period of time.
See also their moves in the gaming industry.
I for one am shocked--SHOCKED, I say!--to learn that anything bad could happen as a result of a) putting everything in "the cloud" and b) handing control over the entire world's source code to the likes of Microsoft.
Who could have POSSIBLY foreseen any kind of dire consequences?
This thread has complaints about software coming from the same supplier both degrading.
The person(s) who wanted this want Azure to get bigger and have prioritized Azure over Windows and Office, and their share price has been growing handsomely.
‘Microslop’, perhaps, but their other nickname has a $ in it for a reason.
> We are in a future that nobody wanted.
some people wanted this future and put in untold amount of money to make it happen. Hint: one of them is a rabid Tolkien fan.
the irony of Tolkien being associated with a techno-dystopia makes me nauseous
Rent seekers paradise (ft copilot)
Laughs in my own Linux distro
MS PM's wanted it, got their OKR's OK'd, got their bonuses, and moved on.
> We are in a future that nobody wanted.
Nor deserved.
Then why is it the future we have?
Let’s just say there are a couple of guys, who are up to no good. And they started making trouble in our neighborhood.
jokes aside it’s all because of hyper financial engineering. Every dollar every little cent must be maximized. Every process must be exploited and monetized, and there are a small group of people who are essentially driving all this all across the world in every industry.
It was a complete accident. Nobody could have foreseen it. We are currently experiencing the sudden discovery that Microsoft is an evil corporation and maybe putting everything in the cloud wasn't the best move after all.
So React rewrite did not help after all? Imagine, one of the largest software tool companies on Earth cannot reliably REbuild something in React. I lost count of the inconsistency issues React introduced.
React isn't causing these issues.
Ya, it really was one of the most enjoyable web apps to use pre-MS. I'm sure there are lots of things that have contributed to this downfall. We certainly didn't need bullshit features like achievements.
Even just a year or two ago its web interface was way snappier. Now an issue with a non-trivial number of comments, or a PR with a diff of even just a few hundred or thousand lines of changes causes my browser to lock up.
But even clicking around tabs and whatnot is noticeably slower. It used to be incredibly snappy.
I've been a GitHub user since the very early days. I had a beta invite to the service. I really wish they didn't swap out the FE for a React FE.
They need to start rolling back some of their most recent changes.
I mean, if they want people to start moving to self hosted GitLab, this is gonna get that ball rolling.
GitLab is slower for me than that React GH app. Why would I move to GitLab?
> GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works.
it's almost as if Microsoft bought it, isn't it?
We loved Github as a product when it needed to return or profit beyond "getting more users".
I feel this is just the natural trajectory for any VC-funded "service" that isn't actually profitable at the time you adopt it. Of course it's going to change for the worse to become profitable.
GitHub isn't VC funded at the moment, though. It's owned by Microsoft. Not that this necessarily changes your point.
I don’t get it. Why making the UI shittier would possibly lead to more profit?
“ I enjoy GH copilot as much as the next person”
So not at all?
Really? I’d be interested to hear more.
Disclaimer: I work in Microsoft (albeit in a quite disconnected part of it, nothing to do with GitHub or Copilot).
That does seem to be the implication, yes. :D
Github used to publish some pretty interesting postmortems. Maybe they still do. IIRC that they were struggling with scaling their SQL db and were starting to hit the limits. It's a tough position to be in because you have to either to a massive migration to a data layer with much different semantics, or you have to keep desperately squeezing performance and skirting on the edge of outages with a DB that wasn't really meant to handle what you're doing with it now. The OpenAI blog post on "scaling" Postgres to their current scale has much the same flavor, although I think they're doing it better than Github appears to be doing.
> Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention and reprioritise towards actually delivering a product that's at least relatively reliable?
It's Microsoft. A reliable product is not a reasonable expectation.
Not going to happen. This is terminal decline. Next step is to kill off free repos, and then they'll start ratcheting up the price to the point that they have one small dedicated engineering team supporting each customer they have. They will have exactly one customer. At some point they'll end up owned by Broadcom, OpenText, Rocket, or Progress.
> Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention and reprioritise towards actually delivering a product that's at least relatively reliable?
They claim that is what they are doing right now. [1]
[1] https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
Zero indication that migrating to azure will improve stability over the colos they are in now. The outages aren’t caused by the datacenter, whatever MS execs say.
Wasn't the last one even caused by Azure?
The problem with the GH front end being an unbelievably bloated mess will not be even slightly improved by moving to Azure.
"Migrating to Azure" is, unfortunately, often the opposite of "delivering a reliable product".
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Maybe take the initiative and move your own first? It definitely would have a bigger effect than begging here.
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You might as well self-host at this point as that is far more reliable than depending on GitHub.
Additionally, there is no CEO of GitHub this time that is going to save us here.
So as I said many years ago [0] in the long term, a better way is to self host or use alternatives such as Codeberg or GitLab which at least you can self host your own.
As an aside, God, Azure DevOps, what a total pile of crap that product is
My "favourite" restriction that an Azure DevOps PR description is limited to a pathetic 4000 characters.
My favourite restriction is the fact that colored text doesn't work in dark mode. Why? Because whatever intern they had implement dark mode didn't understand how CSS works, and just slapped !important on all the style changes that make dark mode dark, and thus overwrite the color data.
I ended up writing a browser extension for my team to fix it, because the boss loved to indicate stuff with red/green text.
Amazon's deprecated CodeCommit is limited to 150 chars like it's an old SMS or Tweet.
Ha! Nice. I never worked with CodeStar / CodeCommit. Was it pretty bad?
That's going to depend on each user's demands. The PR message limit is the biggest pain for me. I don't depend on the UI very often. I'm not trying to do any CI/CD nonsense. I just use it as a bog standard git repo. When used as that, it works just fine for me
It shows you the level of quality to expect from a Microsoft flagship cloud product...
So I work for a devtools vendor (Snyk) and 6 months ago I signed into Azure DevOps for the first time in my life
I couldn't believe it. I actually thought the product was broken. Just from a visual perspective it looked like a student project. And then I got to _using_ the damn thing
It's also completely unloved. Even MSFT Azure's own documentation regularly treats it as a second class citizen to GitHub. I have no idea why they don't just deprecate the service and officially feature freeze it.
Honestly that's the case with a lot of Azure services though.
It's the boards. GitHub issues doesn't let you do all the arcane nonsense Azure DevOps' boards let you do.
You would kind of expect with the pressure of supporting OpenAI and GitHub etc. that Azure would have been whipped into shape by now.
AZDO has been in KTLO maintenance mode for years.