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0 pointsajross3mo ago0 comments

I think this is being downvoted unfairly. I mean, sure, as a company accepting payment for services, being down for a few hours every few months is notably bad by modern standards.

But the inward-looking point is correct: git itself is a distributed technology, and development using it is distributed and almost always latency-tolerant. To the extent that github's customers have processes that are dependent on services like bug tracking and reporting and CI to keep their teams productive, that's a bug with the customer's processes. It doesn't have to be that way and we as a community can recognize that even if the service provider kinda sucks.

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progmetaldev3mo ago

There are still some processes that require a waterfall method for development, though. One example would be if you have a designer, and also have a front-end developer that is waiting for a feature to be complete to come in and start their development. I know on HN it's common for people to be full-stack developers, or for front-end developers to be able to work with a mockup and write the code before a designer gets involved, but there are plenty of companies that don't work that way. Even if a company is working in an agile manner, there still may come a time where work stalls until some part of a system is finished by another team/team-member, especially in a monorepo. Of course they could change the organization of their project, but the time suck of doing that (like going with microservices) is probably going to waste quite a bit more time than how often GitHub is down.

ajrossOP3mo ago

> There are still some processes that require a waterfall method for development, though

Not on the 2-4 hour latency scale of a GitHub outage though. I mean, sure, if you have a process that requires the engineering talent to work completely independently on day-plus timescales and/or do all their coordination offline, then you're going to have a ton of trouble staffing[1] that team.

But if your folks can't handle talking with the designers over chat or whatnot to backfill the loss of the issue tracker for an afternoon, then that's on you.

[1] It can obviously be done! But it's isomorphic to "put together a Linux-style development culture", very non-trivial.

toastal3mo ago

Being snapshot-based. Git has some issues being distributed in practice since the patch order matter which means you basically need to have some centralized authoritative server in most cases with more than 2 folks to resolve the order of patches for meaningful uses as the hash is used in so many contexts.

ajrossOP3mo ago

That's... literally what a merge collision is. The tooling for that predates git by decades. The solutions are all varying levels of non-trivial and involve tradeoffs, but none of them require 24/7 cloud service availability.

toastal2mo ago

Using a Patch Theory-based option like Darcs or Pijul exist today & don’t have the tradeoff while also working offline.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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progmetaldev3mo ago

ajrossOP3mo ago

> There are still some processes that require a waterfall method for development, though

But if your folks can't handle talking with the designers over chat or whatnot to backfill the loss of the issue tracker for an afternoon, then that's on you.

[1] It can obviously be done! But it's isomorphic to "put together a Linux-style development culture", very non-trivial.

toastal3mo ago

ajrossOP3mo ago

toastal2mo ago

Using a Patch Theory-based option like Darcs or Pijul exist today & don’t have the tradeoff while also working offline.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse