back to article GitHub goes off the Rails as Microsoft closes in

GitHub invited a handful of journalists to its San Francisco headquarters to explain how the social code hosting biz is evolving from a website into a platform. The event was hosted by Sam Lambert, whose title – head of platform – removes any doubt about how things will turn out. Founded in 2008, GitHub became a platform …

  1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Coat

    NAPT (Not Another Platform Thingy)

    Is everything a platform these days?

    Don't we have too many Platforms and not enough trains?

    Or perhaps they are the wrong sort of Platform

    Mines the one with a copy of 'The 1968 Combined Edition' in the pocket.

    1. onefang

      Re: NAPT (Not Another Platform Thingy)

      Maybe this platformer is a side scrolling game?

    2. PhilipN Silver badge

      'The 1968 Combined Edition'

      Helping out any bemused punters here : think back to when they were called "locomotives"

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: NAPT (Not Another Platform Thingy)

      Its just retarded industry jargon.

      Like "full stack" and "DevOps".

      Pretty sure its guff created by higher ups to give the impression of scale or progress.

      Anyway, I'm a First Person Full Stack Side Scrolling Massively Multiplayer Online DevOps Network Topology & Platform manager. Ive got stuff to do. Or so I'm led to believe.

      Man these promotions are getting out of hand. Wish they'd just pay me more. Tsk.

  2. onefang

    "You say to a chatbot, a Hubot, 'I want a new application,' and Moda just bootstraps a repository, puts all the Kubernetes config in there...and you can just start developing really, really quickly."

    Oooor, just push the "New Application" button, and be developing really, really, really quickly.

  3. Chris Hills

    AKA we're cashing in on the hard work of open source contributors.

    1. RyokuMas
      Stop

      "...cashing in on the hard work of open source contributors"

      I thought that was Google's trick?

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        I'm no fan of Google's data grab or monopolistic tendencies, but its engagement with open source projects is almost entirely positive. Your cherry-picking ignores the flaws in the USTPO process that should never allow a patent to be awarded because of prior art. Hence, Google's application to prevent AV1 itself becoming the target for future patent trolls. Google's offer of indemnification of VP8 and VP9 are other examples of this. Google is quite open that is wants better video compression to be able to sell more ads to more people. Blaming it for everything detracts from any argument you might be trying to make.

    2. Tom 38

      To be fair, they give a lot to OSS in return.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > AKA we're cashing in on the hard work of open source contributors.

      Thank you for your concern, but as an open source developer, that is the whole point.

      Why would I bother with the (not always trivial) task of open sourcing stuff that I write or fixing/improving stuff that others have written, if nobody is going to use it?

      Someone else may make more money than I off my own code? So what? Having my project picked up by the big boys is still a net win as it increases the project's visibility, prestige, hands available and, where applicable, revenue.

      Don't worry about us, hobbyist / independent open source contributors, we're doing just fine.

  4. PM from Hell
    Flame

    Great more automated non-perfomant code

    "There used to be this pride in being super technical and getting into the weeds," he said. "That's kind of not cool anymore. What's cool is getting stuff to your users." ®

    I think I'm on cycle 5 of this theory in my career, product after product which allows devs to put together flaky prototypes which are then released into the production environment and amazingly, don't scale. Then one of the less fashionable 'geeks' has to strip out the auto generated code which is making the product I/.O bound, disassemble the queries join the same table 6 times and fix the error reporting so it means something to the end user.

    Of course this is normally done at 10 pm on a thursday night when everyone but myself and a couple of old techies are sat in a dark office trying to make sure we can get the app in a fit state to restart by morning.

    1. Starace
      Flame

      Re: Great more automated non-perfomant code

      The disease is spreading everywhere. Far too many things with rubbish performance and a massive footprint because someone has used an 'easy' platform to build them.

      And let's not talk about automated testing where mainstream things go out the door 'working' but have basic bugs due to stupidity by the developers who can't keep it working day to day. (Points accusing finger at the OpenStack mob)

      1. Number6

        Re: Great more automated non-perfomant code

        I remember complaining about this with Windows 3. As an exercise, we wrote a program (not an app in those days) using all the Windows classes and it was something over 100k in size by the time it had linked in all the bloat. Then we wrote it without all of that as a DOS program and it was a couple of KB.

        Frameworks are nice but be aware of the side effects. This also goes for those who put the frameworks together - don't build in mega dependencies so that using one function brings in War and Peace as a side effect.

  5. bombastic bob Silver badge
    Meh

    I'm still in 'wait and see' mode

    I still have stuff on github, and am not planning on moving it any time soon. It's just a place to put things, really. The 'issues' system can be helpful, and I've contributed to other projects with it [submitted pull requests].

    None of that seems to have changed.

    And so I'm still in 'wait and see' mode, making sure that none of that is LOST or corrupted by "microsoft-isms", too many mousey-clickey motions or the requirement to use a ".Not"-based plugin or C-pound or something equally *HIDEOUS*. As long as they don't go there, I guess I'll be, uh, 'happy' with github.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm still in 'wait and see' mode

      "The 'issues' system can be helpful" Only yesterday I noticed something and went to post an issue to help the devs, the login came up and... agree to new terms, I left without posting the help.

  6. Milton

    The joy of the worthless pun

    The head and subtitle—

    GitHub goes off the Rails as Microsoft closes in

    The content of the article—

    " ... Ruby still has a place at GitHub – Lambert referred to the company as a Ruby shop ..."

    Wouldn't want to sacrifice a worthlessly infantile pun on the altar of accuracy, would we?

  7. Androgynous Cupboard Silver badge

    Show me code that connects to the database?

    Show me code that makes this stupid &%@£ing program crash repeatedly

    Show me code that I can pinch for my own project

    Show me code that I don't fully understand and can't really describe properly, which is why I am using a "natural language" search to search for something technical.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "because the workloads tend to be I/O and storage intensive, which isn't great for the cloud"

    That's why, having the capacity on-premises, I avoid anything cloudy - including GitHub.

    This enormous chest where everybody is putting their eggs really worries me - especially since you're not sure what the current owners is going to do with them, and how safe your code and other stuff really is.

    While more neutral services (where you're running your own software) may have some advantages if you can't scale adequately in-house, I really don't understand what GitHub gives you over hosting Git locally.

    Yes, I understand barebone Git is one of the worst software ever written, missing many important pieces needed in any complex environment you have to add yourself, but it's not that difficult, and you can tailor it to your needs.

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