13 karma · joined April 11, 2021
I've always envisioned as a comment or plug-in on the ticketing system itself. Then when the branch linked to that ticket was completed and deployed, it'd trigger a marketing automation or something like your tweet (xeet?) mechanism.
Cool stuff! Sorry you're getting a couple of sarcastic comments here.
I definitely agree with your points about UI and the ceremonies of our current version control system.
One thing I've been thinking about this morning is that maybe it isn't the underlying protocol that needs to evolve, but the user experience that sits on top of the protocol. As I've asked this question to many engineers in my network, most are satisfied with the technical performance of git and the problem it solves, and their pains are almost all on the UX and organizational layer.
That's a super interesting take. The obvious thing is that the surface area of automation has improved and you can build a lot of tools to help with that, but you also need tooling to help deal with that overload of new automation - especially if your bandwidth is limited.
I know there are issues with open source projects getting a lot of spam PRs from folks trying to fluff their contributions on their profiles. I can definitely see that getting worse with AI systems, but I haven't been in these communities enough to be familiar with that pain myself.
But a few things that have always stood out to me about the user experience of version control:
- Git allows us to work in parallel effectively on different branches, but when our whole team is focused on one set of interrelated new features, we spend a lot of overhead coordination time figuring out how to not create conflicts for eachother. So we can work in parallel, but not in real-time with eachother's changes. The multiplayer aspect of design in Figma comes to mind here.
- I and many folks at my level use github in much simpler way than many older coworkers do. I rarely touch anything that isn't basic branching, commits and merging
- As a very visual thinker, it took me a very long time to grok git and what I was doing. As I've worked with more devs who come from non-engineering backgrounds, I've found this pretty common
My two cents, the interviews here are going to help them assess how you work your way through problems, how you think and process, and how you communicate. That is a very valuable signal to get out of someone you're potentially going to be in the trenches collaborating with. That is the true value behind these route sets of challenges, much more son than "can this person code?"
We've hired engineers that have been absolutely amazing teammates in our department that on paper have had wonky technical interview questions, but it was because of the attitude and their approach in the moment that won us over.
They know you can code, they can see the OSS. The "hoops" here are for the intangibles.
The goal is definitely to find and capture those moments of magic that happened a lot more often in early Internet. I think some of that is having this newsletter as my framing for exploring the fringes of the Internet today, and the rest is trying to find the magic in the tools we use everyday.
Anything interesting in particular you'd recommend diving into?
Would love any ideas of feedback y'all have on this first post. I'm super excited to explore this idea space.