Half of these "achievements" are simply highlighting spam/abuse on the platform which goes relatively unchecked since it still equates to usage & drives up metrics.
I'm not sure that really changes anything other than at any one time wishing you were on the other side.
If you can have 1% of stuff down 100% of the time, or 100% of the stuff down 1% of the time, I think there's a preference we _feel_ is better, but I'm not sure one is actually more practical than the other.
Of course, people can always mirror things, but that's not really what this comment is about, since people can do that today if they feel like.
whenever somebody posts the oversimplified “1% of things are down 100% of the time” form of distributed downtime, i take pride in knowing that this is exactly what we have at the physical layer today and the fact the poster isn’t aware every time their packets get re-routed shows that it works.
at a higher layer in the stack though, consider the well-established but mostly historic mail list patch flow: even when the listserver goes down, i can still review and apply patches from my local inbox; i can still directly email my co-maintainers and collaborators. new patches are temporarily delayed, but retransmit logic is built in so that the user can still fire off the patch and go outside, rather than check back in every while to see if it’s up yet.
Now I'm thinking that default Github flow is almost there.
> i can still review and apply patches from my local inbox
`git fetch` gets me all the code from open PRs. And comments are already in email. Now I'm thinking if I should put `git fetch` in crontab.
> retransmit logic is built in so that the user can still fire off the patch and go outside
You can do that with a couple lines of bash, but I bet someone's already made a prettier script to retry an arbitrary non-interactive command like `git push`? This works best if your computer stays on while you go outside, but this is often the case even with a laptop, and even more so if you use a beefy remote server for development.
The whole point of DVCS is that everyone who's run `git clone` has a full copy of the entire repo, and can do most of their work without talking to a central server.
Brief downtime really only affects the infrastructure surrounding the actual code. Workflows, issues, etc.
> Brief downtime really only affects the infrastructure surrounding the actual code. Workflows, issues, etc.
That's exactly the point. This infrastructure used to be supported by email which is also distributed and everyone has a complete copy of all of the data locally.
Github has been slowly trying to embrace, extend, and extinguish the distributed model.
Honestly I like it better. The entire industry pauses at the same time vs random people getting hit at random times. It is like when us-east-1 goes down. Everyone takes a break at the same time since we're all in the same boat, and we all have legitimate excuses to chill for a bit.
I've always wished we could all agree on something like "timeout Tuesdays" where everyone everywhere paused on new features and focused on cleaning something up.
I was really hoping GitHub would focus on a IPO vs. acquisition. I honestly think we would be saying the same things about Google/Apple if they had decided to swoop in and make a deal here (so none of what I say is directed specifically at Microsoft).
I think the general consensus is that we want a new, independent org, that genuinely cares about OSS but has the mind to create/maintain a sustainable business model and ensure the long-term success of an OSS platforms is extremely important (and now we'll look to Gitlab and others for that).
Microsoft will, no doubt, have their fingers all over this platform in short order. It's what they're paying for; and it's an extremely smart move (EXTREMELY). Some of GitHubs product offerings have competitors within the Microsoft ecosystem already, which may spell bad times for those long-term. Atom directly competes with VSCode and it simply doesn't make sense to continue development of two, independent, IDEs. Electron utilizes Chromium under the hood, and I'd be hard pressed to thunk Microsoft wouldn't want to try and inject Edge/Chakra into that platform somehow.
It makes good business sense to consolidate efforts once a company is acquired. I give it, at most, 12-18 months before you start seeing major changes to both of those platforms that reflect Microsofts own interests.
Canada... 'nough said. If we don't do what we can to bring Amazon North then I have absolutely zero faith in our ability to ever take tech seriously beyond the wall. I don't care where the HQ ends up so long as it's on this side of the boarder. #YYZ (Toronto) #YVR (Vancouver) or, the most likely spot, #YGK (Kingston/Waterloo) are all great options. Talent could once again stay here instead of the decade(plus)-long brain-drain to the South.
100% agree. Continuing to create division with gender or race biased events/groups doesn't seem helpful. The greater issue here is the disadvantaged at large. Why continue to divide our efforts in smaller niche segments? What's wrong with allowing anyone to join in on these sessions?
A lot of these groups, and their titles, just seem to further stigmatize the segments they're trying to help. True equality will only come when access to information and opportunity are available globally and without bias. Drawing lines in the sand isn't the way to go about change.
