I love Github. It’s a part of my daily workflow. I’m user #24816, I joined on a cruise ship wifi in 2008.
I remember the first time I worked with Heroku, a soon-to-be-defunct app. I vividly remember how it felt after hitting the enter key and watching my code being built in real-time. To be completely honest, it felt like magic. Services like Heroku have come and gone, but I’m still chasing that high.
I remember the first time I deployed a website to Github Pages. It was a simple static site, hosted on a single HTML file. I was so proud of myself, and I remember how excited I was to see my website live.
I remember the first gist I posted, the first time the activity graph caught people’s attention, getting merch in the mail, Microsoft acquiring Github, the pandemic, the AI boom, and everything in between.
What I don’t remember is Github outages occuring almost every other day. For whatever reason, Github outages have become a regular occurance. Take a look at the Github status page to see for yourself, the status is often yellow, sometimes red. The github status page resembles more like a traffic jam, or a christmas tree, than a stable service.
It’s not even the obscure services either, from actions to authentication failures to search to pull requests, it seems that every day there is some core part of the service “experiencing degraded performance”.
Github as a platform is great only when people who care enough to make it better stays, and as of current, I see many people abandoning ship. For years, Github benefited from a virtous cycle: the more popular it became, the more people cared about it, the more it improved. I have no doubt that Github is the reason why Git won over every other version control system for the average developer. It’s the reason why courses in university teach git over SVN or CVS or Mercurial.
I’m not sure what’s going on over at msft, but they better figure it out.