This and the codespaces stuff in general seems particularly useful for getting less technical people using GitHub for documentation as opposed to Confluence/Notion. I’d be interested to see how it develops and if it is possible to make that work or if it will still be slightly too tech-y.
In general though, I hadn’t seen the GitHub Next site before, and while some of the (non-LLM) stuff seems interesting, I can’t help but feel like the core workflow for handling PRs is being neglected. For dev-teams that prefer a fast-paced trunk-based/patch-based approach, the options are basically Gerrit or Phorge/Phabricator, neither of which have the mindshare or ease-of-use of GitHub. While I’ve mainly switched to sr.ht for personal stuff, I’d really like to see GitHub spend some time working on the core dev workflow. My main wish would be a view that collapses all the tabs for a PR into a single page and moving all of the approve/comment/request changes checkboxes into a single place to reduce the amount of clicking needed to review a large number of PRs.
We’re seeing the Microsoft shoe drop. GitHub is no longer a mere code repository, where you keep the code you create and deploy somewhere else. MSFT is aiming for the entire “meta-stack”: editing via online VSCode using Copilot, building via GH, deploying on Azure. The aim is to have everything done in the browser, there’s no need for even a disk to keep the code on. No doubt they’ll find a way to shoehorn LinkedIn into the mix, finally creating Nerd Salesforce.
Yes, it’s the classic pattern of convergence across the entire stack, the holy grail of profit maximizers and rent seekers. They won’t be satisfied until your shoelace needs a Microsoft login to stay tied. Git is amazing in that it trivially allows you to move your entire repository to another host, but as soon as you start using GitHub PRs and issues, you are locked in. That’s how they get you. There is a war on files in general - more and more software tools make it difficult to open and save files on the local file system in an attempt to force you to use their cloud solution.
There is a war on files in general - more and more software tools make it difficult to open and save files on the local file system in an attempt to force you to use their cloud solution.
Every time I see a blog post claiming that local development is dead I think of this. In-browser development environments could be a great way to expose more people to this profession, but not at the expense of locking us out of the systems we build and tinker with.
It’s already a social network causing anxiety about posting activity like Microsoft LinkedIn so why not?
The difference is that I deleted my Microsoft LinkedIn account years ago & sadly can’t my Microsoft GitHub account or I would be completely locked out of so many projects.
One area I’d love to see realtime collaboration is the PR review page. Multiple times I’ve spent a decent chunk of time reviewing a PR only to submit the review and find four that a colleague basically left the same exact review several minutes earlier. Something akin to Figma or Google Docs would be incredible.
This and the codespaces stuff in general seems particularly useful for getting less technical people using GitHub for documentation as opposed to Confluence/Notion. I’d be interested to see how it develops and if it is possible to make that work or if it will still be slightly too tech-y.
In general though, I hadn’t seen the GitHub Next site before, and while some of the (non-LLM) stuff seems interesting, I can’t help but feel like the core workflow for handling PRs is being neglected. For dev-teams that prefer a fast-paced trunk-based/patch-based approach, the options are basically Gerrit or Phorge/Phabricator, neither of which have the mindshare or ease-of-use of GitHub. While I’ve mainly switched to sr.ht for personal stuff, I’d really like to see GitHub spend some time working on the core dev workflow. My main wish would be a view that collapses all the tabs for a PR into a single page and moving all of the approve/comment/request changes checkboxes into a single place to reduce the amount of clicking needed to review a large number of PRs.
We’re seeing the Microsoft shoe drop. GitHub is no longer a mere code repository, where you keep the code you create and deploy somewhere else. MSFT is aiming for the entire “meta-stack”: editing via online VSCode using Copilot, building via GH, deploying on Azure. The aim is to have everything done in the browser, there’s no need for even a disk to keep the code on. No doubt they’ll find a way to shoehorn LinkedIn into the mix, finally creating Nerd Salesforce.
Yes, it’s the classic pattern of convergence across the entire stack, the holy grail of profit maximizers and rent seekers. They won’t be satisfied until your shoelace needs a Microsoft login to stay tied. Git is amazing in that it trivially allows you to move your entire repository to another host, but as soon as you start using GitHub PRs and issues, you are locked in. That’s how they get you. There is a war on files in general - more and more software tools make it difficult to open and save files on the local file system in an attempt to force you to use their cloud solution.
Every time I see a blog post claiming that local development is dead I think of this. In-browser development environments could be a great way to expose more people to this profession, but not at the expense of locking us out of the systems we build and tinker with.
The only thing anyone needs on their local file system is 700 copies of Chromium.
It’s already a social network causing anxiety about posting activity like Microsoft LinkedIn so why not?
The difference is that I deleted my Microsoft LinkedIn account years ago & sadly can’t my Microsoft GitHub account or I would be completely locked out of so many projects.
One area I’d love to see realtime collaboration is the PR review page. Multiple times I’ve spent a decent chunk of time reviewing a PR only to submit the review and find four that a colleague basically left the same exact review several minutes earlier. Something akin to Figma or Google Docs would be incredible.
Instead of synchronous, slow
git send-email, I want to see real-timegit send-xmppI’d say you’d get that it you do individual comments rather than submitting a review, you’d get that behaviour already?
Reviews have a better UX than individual comments.