alt Hacker NewsCan 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.
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“ I enjoy GH copilot as much as the next person”
So not at all?
The ultimate irony is that Linus Thorvalds designed git with the Linux kernel codebase in mind to work without any form of infrastructure centralisation. No repo trumps any other.
Surely some of your crazy kids can rummage up a CI pipeline on their laptop? 8)
Anyway, I only use GH as something to sync interesting stuff from, so it doesn't get lost.
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.
Maybe take the initiative and move your own first? It definitely would have a bigger effect than begging here.
> 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...
My org just moved to Gitlab because of the GH actions problems.
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.
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.
Honestly, Gitlab is pretty decent.
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.