Comment by alastairp
15 hours ago
> What GitHub Gave Us
To me one of the clear things that GitHub gave us was a structure around a person rather than a project. To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name than it was to go through the (what felt to me) very serious process of coming up with a project name and reserving it on sourceforge just to get a cvs or svn repository (along with website, mailing lists, issue tracking(?), etc, etc...). It felt like the mental load of "oh this is just a quick thing" was a lot easier with github.
> It gave projects issue trackers, pull requests, release pages, wikis, organization pages, API access, webhooks, and later CI.
Although it didn't give us this all at once. I still remember when we created a new user account in order to simulate an organisation, before they existed. I distinctly recall discussing with friends if we wanted to set up a bug tracker software for our project with the assumption that "GitHub will probably release one in a few months anyway". In the end we just kept a text file committed in the repository. Issues were announced a few months later.
>To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name
If I remember correctly, it was also one of the few places sticking to the now-standard passing of the parameters via path rather than the '?' URL query part.
It might not seem like much now, but then the ease and simple beauty of having just github.com/user/repo - not only for web access but also cloning - was definitely some freshness factor.
Definitely not. That's been a thing for at least as long as mod_rewrite has existed (and I'm sure there's prior art). It was common long before GitHub.
It happened, but not as often as you'd think. In 2017 I was arguing with someone that the back button should work and URLs should be obvious in a fairly large project and they said "people are used to the back button not working - like a bank website".
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Huh? The usual pattern is that experiments belong to a user and then they graduate to having their own org iff they grow enough maintainers for that to make sense. How is that toxic or self-centered? It's just like "here's a place to do low-stakes experiments in public view". It's not particularly about ego or selfishness or whatever.
“Organizations” didn't exist until GitHub was already popular and entrenched, and it got popular and entrenched by centering the person developing the code instead of the code that was being developed: https://github.blog/news-insights/introducing-organizations/
And they weren't free until 2020: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/learning-about-github...
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Good grief. Now the YouTube Shorts crowd is showing up here too.
Very strange take. A lot of software is built on trust and the people behind it. Hence why the social aspect of Github was so important to a lot of open source software.
Hey, thank you for staying polite while expressing disagreement. That's much appreciated.
To the risk it might seem surprising, I actually completely agree that trust is essential to software creation and and use.
Actually I would more broadly frame it as, no trust, no viable sustainable society, no technical/cultural artifact.
But trust and societies can be realized without individualism as underlying chief paradigm.
That doesn't mean total negation of individual though. One alternative, among others yet different approches, can be state as a metaphor of individual like a cell in a social body. Thus the term metastasis, as when a cell starts to degenerate in self centric behavior at the expense of the health of the body as a whole. On the other hand, no cell, no body.
I don't think it was important. It just came at a time when sourceforge was being heavily enshittified.
The most insane response I've ever read here, so far.
What a weird take on what GP said...
Bruh.
Thanks for introducing me to a term I want aware of.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bruh for those who also wonder.
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