A whole other level of evolution to do it while you’re large. Imagine Apple suddenly publishing their roadmap. This type of organizational neurogenesis done as an adult is impressive.
EDIT: I am in admiration of the change, regardless of opinion on the value of public roadmaps. It’s just rare to see big companies make big changes. Sign of youthful vitality and health, in my opinion.
Ex. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan...
The upcoming launches section is literally just an HTML table with two columns: service name on the left and a brief summary on the right like "Add support for X Y.Y". It's almost funny how so much effort goes into fancy blog design when the "real" news is just distributed through a basic plain text email :)
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To a certain extent, roadmaps become redundant for enterprise customers too in that you start to influence feature request priorities via your dedicated account manager(s)
Vendors may often prioritise a feature requested by medium enterprise to keep them content since if they don't address their features in a timely manager, they may go elsewhere when their contract comes up for renew.
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I suppose that's why UserVoice type of forums are always a wasteland because the big players can get all the attention?
It's also behind the scenes so perhaps naturally, the result you're left with is acres of "9999 votes for feature X, submitted 14 years ago" and a Product Owner saying "Sorry, no news to report on this just yet"
Apple is similar to Disney in their core business model being anti-golden-rule. Not "treat others as you would like to be treated" but "treat others as you want to treat them, and insist they treat you as you want". Don't care about respecting others' trademarks or ideas, take creative bits from everyone, be super vigilant and protective (even antagonistic) about anyone else who uses any of your ideas.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/ann...
A public GCP roadmap is also in longer plans but there's a few internal flows we want to improve first. I'm especially trying to reduce the number of sites people need to visit, and want to ultimately see it land in a common place where authenticated users also see the non-public / NDA aspects.
And seconding this advice on access. If you are a GCP customer, your account manager is able to add your account for access. My contact info is in my profile and I can reach your account team if you have difficulties.
- Release notes: https://cloud.google.com/release-notes
- GCP Blog: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp
Am I wrong for presuming that the people who would most care about GitHub's public roadmap probably aren't even GitHub users?
EDIT: Thanks for the replies, everyone. Seems like I hadn't fully comprehended the range of features available to paying members - given this knowledge, choosing to do the roadmap in this form makes more sense to me.
Free tier users, maybe not.
But paying users care very much about what they can expect for their outlay of money in the years to come. Roadmap presentations for paid software are _de rigueur_; they help keep your paying customers on your platform.. They're just not often shared openly like this.
Github has a vested interest in attracting more and more free-tier customers though. Then they go to companies and influence tool purchasing decisions and help feed the paying customer funnel. So this seems like a risk with some postive calculus behind it. It could be that free-tier users didn't know they wanted to know the roadmap, and now that they do they'll be happy they know about it.
I think so. I'm a GitHub user and I like being able to view their roadmap.
Think about it this way. GitHub is a giant piece of software that developers use. Software changes, and developers are particularly sensitive to this. We're constantly fixing bugs and factoring code to support dependency shifts (or choosing to snapshot ourselves at some preestablished point of stability).
Given our sensitivity to change and how important GitHub's product is to our productivity it's crucial that we're not hit with surprises. A properly communicated roadmap helps avoid that -- thought admittedly it does take some work on our part as customers to parse it. That said this is no different than reading release notes and documentation for the software and libraries we use elsewhere in our day to day.
Thank you! We couldn't have said it better ourselves. Let us know if you have any other feedback on what we can provide you to plan better. And thanks for your use of GitHub!
This feels like it opens github up to the vocal minority to scream and yell publicly about features they want. Some of which could negatively impact other users. And github will have to succumb to the pressure of that minority.
Interestingly, my small SaaS was using GitHub projects as a public roadmap for the last 2 years already! Even at our small scale it has already proven useful for finding beta users, getting feedback etc.
I can imagine "GitHub Discussions" [0] cutting off a significant number of Stack Overflow questions.
This is quite some timing for me, since the StackOverflow announcement earlier today had me thinking what could replace it. This is a clear, promising possibility.
What announcement? Are they planning to sunset something? All I could find was this blog post from the CEO, which was overly positive: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/07/28/ceo-quarterly-blog-pos...
It also means that rather than building up SO's capital, you're indirectly contributing to the open source knowledge base of a project. It'd be even better if the discussion were backed by a Git repo or something easily exportable so that you aren't tied to Github, though I suppose part of the motivation for this feature is doing exactly that.
Still, SO has been king for too long. And the king's crown has been looking rather tarnished for a little while now.
Looking at the Discussions issue page - https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/104 - it looks like this will be delivered to projects not in the Beta testing group sometime before Christmas?
Out of interest, are there any project admins around who can comment on how easy it is to moderate the Discussions threads? My one concern would be managing flame wars, and minimising inaccurate answers participants may offer each other.
There's a soft NDA on people who are in the Discussions beta. It's also early enough that there's a direct pipeline to GitHub Staff on issues that are truly urgent, so it's really too early to say. The Issues moderation things like locking and org-level blocking definitely still exist and work in Discussions, though.
For devs, you'll get a forum setup without requiring time/money to set up your own hosting, which is big for small or bootstrapped projects. It will also help move specific questions out of your issues section/ticketing system.
For users, it lowers the friction associated with getting support since many already have a GitHub account.
Dark mode is coming. The foundational work we are doing first is to replace all our custom HTML and CSS with components that are more readily themable. This will also help us improve accessibility, and help us replace our mobile web site with a fully responsive UI.
Are you looking for this?
I see it in lots of products and kind of ignored it, but is this a priority for users?
On OLED screens like my phones, black reduces energy use. On regular screens, dark mode subjectively seems to make things easier on my eyes. I also use f.lux and related technologies. I also sometimes use yellow-tinting screen glasses. I have no idea if any of this is scientifically valid, but at this point I can feel my eyes decline significantly as I age. My particular vision is 20/20 but one of my eyes is much worse and this contributes to a lot of eye strain. I also have pretty chronic headaches.
Since my entire ability to make money hinges on computer screens, I will take whatever nonsense option seems, subjectively, to make things easier on myself or preserve my longevity.
GitHub and HN are probably the two things I use most that do not support dark mode natively. My sense is that as far as feature requests go, dark mode typically does not tie up resources that otherwise would be allocated to more functionality-based features. GitHub doesn't need to provision more servers, for instance, in order to implement dark mode. HN already has colour customization, we need only to be able to customize a few other colours to allow dark mode natively.
I recently worked my way down feature requests enough to reach dark mode for a site I run and users were ecstatic, moreso than they were for big, new features that'd been requested thousands more times. I don't use it personally, but I think it's a "feel good" thing when you have the choice of dark or light mode.
Highly recommend. Also worth changing the default background color in Firefox to avoid burning your retinas every time a page loads.
That kind of stuff is exactly why I’ve stopped going “dark everything.”
Some apps/websites are and will forever be WHITE and, if I use dark mode plus max screen brightness (to increase contrast), I’ll be blinded every time I open/visit one.
You know what doesn’t blind me? Using regular white pages with low brightness. Bonus points: my battery lasts longer.
Note: there is no "slave" branch.
Intent matters, not the literal meaning of the word taken a specific orthogonal context. Not a single person in the millions of developers ever had a perverse notion of what master branch means.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/08/developers_renew_push...
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/jun/23/gitbranchname/
https://github.blog/2020-07-27-highlights-from-git-2-28/#int...
and some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23968417
This way, we are in a mob rule. No one is independently thinking and questioning. Going against the grain is automatic suicide. Virtue signaling everywhere.
Paul Graham writes about it: http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html
The word is not necessary, so why does anyone have to be offended if it's changed?
Nobody is offended it's being changed. Nobody is offended it says master either , it's just plain unnecessary and in general doing stupid and unnecessary things is a bad idea because it prevents the person doing so from doing something useful and good
I am fine with it, it is just so far fetched that it seems unnecessary and pedantic. It would be hypocritical to target one thing but not the rest. How about also removing the word "Master" from the dictionary? We should go the full 9 yards you know.
What's next? We wanna lobby MasterCard to rebrand themselves? Because everyone thinks that it is a card for the "Masters", right?
Absolutely ridiculous. I also heard some noise about the Chess game and colors of the pieces.
Did you ask them all? I also never noted that it could be offensive. But "main" seems to be a good alternative and as long as master still works as a synonym, nothing should break changing it. The only contra to changing it would be the money Github spends on development. But that's their decision. Overall, I fail to see the problem.
One example: just yesterday I found out that public images on GitHub Packages Docker registry can't be used in GitHub Actions' jobs.<job_id>.container, since the former is gated by auth for whatever goddamn reason and the latter can only pull from public registries. Think about it, their (probably #1) container-related feature can't use their own registry. Apparently people have been complaining for almost a year now, yet nothing has changed.
My tiny example was the release of statuses. It included a pop-up to tell me it was there -- everyone knows developers find those obnoxious, just let me discover the feature myself. Plus, the feature just isn't relevant to me as someone who isn't actively participating in open source or looking for a job right now. The little animations were also slightly janky, and the button didn't feel like it was in a neat and orderly place - just sort of tacked on so that it'd be seen.
My hunch is that this comes from organizationally overemphasizing shipping something splashy instead of something amazing. Is the company celebrating "discerning people find this to be uncompromisingly good" (even for small or old features) as much as "this thing was noticed by a lot of people and then this other thing was noticed by a lot of people too"?
Overall I feel that under Nat, GitHub has walked this line quite well - just feels like it slips a little sometimes as a natural pendulum swing
Thanks, @ianwalter. We plan on having a public feedback repo soon - but in the meantime, if you want to submit ideas, please check out https://support.github.com/contact/feedback.
Also I'm not sure it's a great a idea to use their actions actions as it creates dependencies on someone elses repos and Github itself. I feel I should just write my tests in a container, but I think I've hit a wall there pretty quick too.
I guess the good news is that the majority of the items on the roadmap are github actions related?
Such a mechanism would be an actual meaningful step for enabling access to poorer communities.
But arbitrary layers of NAT are free, so in practice this shouldn't actually block anyone. I haven't had a globally reachable IP address for any of my computers ever, and yet here I am on the web.
For a Country like India, surely this cost will matter especially for it's poorest citizens. The limits of this infinite scaling NAT will matter. That and the cost of an IP which I imagine will inflate much higher than $20 an address.
It's 2020, why isn't this a priority on the roadmap. I think it would have a much more meaningful impact to those that need it.
Just open your IDE/CLI and create the branch with one git command.
Look at all the steps that that issue lists. It’s ludicrous.
I wonder if the plan to incorporate features from Azure DevOps is still on-going.
Issue dependencies should be part of the core issue tracker. And GitHub has multi-repo boards, but only for repose in the same org.
You can self host if you want, easy on Heroku.
Plug and play.
> We will add an option when submitting a pull request for review to auto-merge it if all checks pass and the pull request is mergeable into the target branch.
IMO they should also make it possible to enable after creating the PR, before the checks finish. That's how Gitlab works and it's really useful even beyond the single author repo they discuss - once you have your approvals and have addressed all the feedback you can enable merge on pipeline completion and move on.
for example https://github.com/CnCNet/cnc-ddraw/files/4974882/ddraw.zip redirects to https://github-production-repository-file-5c1aeb.s3.amazonaw...
I love that the issues each share a common format and provide concise yet clear documentation. The concise bit here is key -- I've had trouble perusing similar, open product roadmaps from other products because of the verbosity / level of detail.
Kudos to GitHub's team for doing such an excellent job in communicating and managing the roadmap. Particularly given the size or the organization -- this is no small feat.
For me, the core features that comprise my GH user story are:
- Code
- Pull Requests
- Issues & Labels
We also have limited use of Actions (for check builds) and heavy use of the API/Webhooks for integration with our own custom CI/CD tooling.
In my opinion, the biggest place where value should be added is in these 3 areas above. Some of the simplest ideas are the most powerful. We get an incredible amount of mileage out of basics like issues & labels. If there were additional aspects to issues similar to labels that could further enhance this experience, I would be very interested. Our entire development process revolves around issues to track tasks.
One of the things I've had in mind would be a way to build a markdown-defined webform template that can be used for populating highly-structured issues without requiring the user to edit a complex document each time.
For example, you could have CustomerTroubleTicketTemplate.md in a .github/issue_templates/ path, and then when you go to click New Issue, a down arrow could be provided that pops a list of all defined issue templates. Selecting one would present the user with a webform (as defined in the template markdown) that collects all required fields to create that issue. The issue could be created with labels/assignments/etc as defined in the markdown document. This would likely require enhancements to GFM.
Bonus points if there is some way to expose specific issue templates through public GH pages so that your customers can submit tickets against your private repositories even though they don't have direct access to your issue buckets. I think a very small step in this direction could obviate a lot of use cases people find with products like Zendesk (it would for us, anyways - we just funnel ZD tickets back into GH issues).
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/...
[2] https://dev.azure.com/mseng/AzureDevOpsRoadmap/_workitems/re...
For any enterprise SaaS businesses trying this at home – keep in mind that any product information that you publish publicly can and likely will be used against you by a competitor in a sales cycle at some point, fairly or unfairly. This might still be worth it overall, but is a real risk that isn't obvious until it happens to you (or you observe your team doing it to someone else).
GitHub - if you're listening, _PLEASE_ implement protected tags :)
https://github.community/t/feature-request-protected-tags/17...
The roadmap is nice and it's nice that we might get to see what is going on or coming up and maybe have a say in it. This seems a lot like what Gitlab is doing though, so perhaps they're trying to get some of Gitlab's goodwill?
Another great roadmap I enjoyed reading through was the one of IPFS. Formatted somewhat differently (one long document) but still just gets me excited reading through it while communicating key objectives and milestones.
I hope that they are able to pull it off. It's ambitious, but they now have a sweet sugar daddy, and can afford it.
I use GH for all my work, and look forward to seeing some of this come to be.
Also, now that it's public, it's interesting to see as a non-enterprise user, that many new planned features are going enterprise first
For example, private GitHub pages: https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/77
A long requested feature for private repos is going enterprise first. Not sure why, I don't know if this is purely business decision or if it has a technical reason
A little OT, but what I'd love to see on the roadmap is rolling back the recent UI changes! Rounding every corner in sight just looks wrong; it doesn't "suit" GitHub. The accompanying layout changes also don't help.
I reacted the same way during preview, and after living with it for a few weeks I still feel the same - the recent UI changes still look and feel odd, like it was little more than busywork.
But Github discussions seems interesting!
In other words: “our issue and community management functionality does not scale.”
