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sobjornstadyesterday at 8:06 PM8 repliesview on HN

I second this. GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works. Even basic functionality like the timeline updating when I push commits is unreliable. The other day I opened a PR diff (not even a particularly large one) and it took fully 15 seconds after the page visually finished loading -- on a $2,000 dev machine -- before any UI elements became clickable. This happened repeatedly.

It is fairly stunning to me that we've come to accept this level of non-functional software as normal.


Replies

HoldOnAMinuteyesterday at 8:10 PM

The trend of "non-functional software" is happening everywhere. See the recent articles about Copilot in Notepad, failing to start because you aren't signed in with your Microsoft Account.

We are in a future that nobody wanted.

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matthewisabelyesterday at 10:20 PM

Hey from the GitHub team. Outages like this are incredibly painful and we'll share a post-mortem once our investigation is complete.

It stings to have this happen as we're putting a lot of effort specifically into the core product, growing teams like Actions and increasing performance-focused initiatives on key areas like pull requests where we're already making solid progress[1]. Would love if you would reach out to me in DM around the perf issues you mentioned with diffs.

There's a lot of architecture, scaling, and performance work that we're prioritizing as we work to meet the growing code demand.

We're still investigating today's outage and we'll share a write up on our status page, and in our February Availability Report, with details on root cause and steps we're taking to mitigate moving forward.

[1] https://x.com/matthewisabel/status/2019811220598280410

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oldestofsportsyesterday at 11:22 PM

This is just microsoft doing the only thing they know, which is taking a good product and turning it into a monster by bashing out whatever feature is on some investors mind that barely even work in a isolated vacuum-sealed test chamber. All microsoft producs are like bad experiments.

dev_l1x_beyesterday at 9:31 PM

So React rewrite did not help after all? Imagine, one of the largest software tool companies on Earth cannot reliably REbuild something in React. I lost count of the inconsistency issues React introduced.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33576722

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sodapopcanyesterday at 8:16 PM

Ya, it really was one of the most enjoyable web apps to use pre-MS. I'm sure there are lots of things that have contributed to this downfall. We certainly didn't need bullshit features like achievements.

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samgranieriyesterday at 8:32 PM

I've been a GitHub user since the very early days. I had a beta invite to the service. I really wish they didn't swap out the FE for a React FE.

They need to start rolling back some of their most recent changes.

I mean, if they want people to start moving to self hosted GitLab, this is gonna get that ball rolling.

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blibbleyesterday at 9:33 PM

> GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works.

it's almost as if Microsoft bought it, isn't it?

kimixayesterday at 8:10 PM

We loved Github as a product when it needed to return or profit beyond "getting more users".

I feel this is just the natural trajectory for any VC-funded "service" that isn't actually profitable at the time you adopt it. Of course it's going to change for the worse to become profitable.

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