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Comment by joshuat | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the "GitHub is a mess" conversation is a little forced at times - I spend a significant portion of my work day in GitHub and while there have been an uptick in outages lately, it still feels like a very solid platform.

I guess I personally wouldn't categorize it as a "mess" and the conversations I read about it here make me think I'm using an entirely different product than everyone else.

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When you work at an enterprise that depends on Github, frequent outages are actually a pretty big deal and begin to impact productivity in a real way.

Yeah and if I was an enterprise I would definitely be self hosting with Forgejo or Gerrit or whatever. But I think for most hobbyists GitHub is still totally fine.

I use it quite a lot and the first time I actually witnessed downtime myself was yesterday.

It feels to me like this is a case of very rapid increase in load from AI pr's more than product quality degrading because of cruft or poor maintenance. It's annoying but I'm not confident that alternatives will do better in the long run vs GitHub (which I'm guessing will improve with time)

It's not only PRs, my personal projects which used github actions were seeing more builds in a single month than all of the previous year.

github for hobbyists and small orgs and simple open source projects is wonderful.

github for large project that rely on CI tool is a nightmare (cost, downtime, etc.)

I'm guessing you dont know about the github actions bug that was running and endless loop consuming 100% cpu costing orgs insane amounts of money that they didn't fix for 3 years.

I love to hate on Github/Microsoft as much as the next person, but considering the insane amount of code being pushed to it every day, I'd say they're doing quite well.

I disagree. They’ve been struggling with up time for a long time, this seems more related to their move to azure than anything else.

It also shows there’s a fundamental problem with their architecture or their development pattern to have these sorts of issues so frequently.

I'd emphasize their practices as being the culprit.

Migrating to different cloud vendors, while difficult, is something that people have done many times before. There's only finite number of incongruences that appear when moving cloud vendors. It's rather difficult to explain the ongoing problems several years after the fact.

Anyone that's worked at a startup knows that one of the best things about it is reflecting on all of the asinine, if not genuinely stupid policies of your previous employer so as not to repeat them. Without any insider knowledge, the practices and procedures GitHub had prior to acquisition probably look nothing like those post-acquisition.

Plus a rather clear lack of investment into improving it / retaining their talent / etc, yeah: https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

Anecdotally: at work I saw quite a lot of github-uptime-related issues, and because they're the central host for everything they become *cough* load bearing for a huge amount of the company. Stability and performance has been dramatically worse than the self-hosted phabricator+gitolite before it.

It's falling apart at the seams for me. Half the time I click somewhere on a page, the whole thing freezes and I have to reload the page. Took forever to install neovim on a new machine today because all the plugins installed via Github and I had to wait like 10 minutes for it to come back up.

I’ve heard from people who left GitHub that Microsoft pulled all their best dev ops people to work on AI scaling. This is blatant disinvestment by Microsoft bc they think GitHub is untouchable. I hope better alternatives than musk come up

Really? I feel the opposite.

Earlier today our app, used by a handful of actual production customers, went down for 30 minutes due to a GCP migration to a new project and we screwed up a secret in prod. This was an all hands on deck firedrill with 5 whys and incident reports and chaos.

Github has been having major production outages routinely! There are companies who can't release, can't build, can't view issues, basically can't work. I'd imagine most orgs using Github have been forced to move off of them or create an alternate approach to actually get shit done.

Very solid? Bro. GitHub is at what, one 9 of reliability? That's a disaster. That's a mess and an embarrassment in any professional sense.

I use GitHub a lot and it does what I need well enough, but I wouldn't spend money on the level of service or performance it generally delivers.

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