Improving the GitHub Workflow for the Microsoft Community

https://github.com/blog/1989-improving-the-github-workflow-for-the-microsoft-community

by gjtorikian • 11 years ago

124 33 11 years ago

github.com

apalmer• 11 years ago

Cool, Microsoft is a beast when focused. Wonder how long it will last.

tdicola• 11 years ago

This announcement is from Github, not Microsoft.

Lancey• 11 years ago

I'm sure Microsoft had some part in making this happen.

perdunov2• 11 years ago

It's almost surreal to see that one of the douchiest companies around is so radically transforming.

nine_k• 11 years ago

Maybe MS desktop OS division was sort of douche, or maybe desktop MS office is not all that innovative.

OTOH, MS Research was always very cool (and they started contributing to e.g. OpenBSD many years ago), OS kernel has always been much better than a glance over win32 API shows you, and Office365 is definitely world-class.

I suspect that the engineering culture in MS has always been rather good (with engineers like you and me, and many of them a good deal better); the radical transformation is probably mostly within the top management.

ripberge• 11 years ago

I guess the biggest functionality here is the ability to create repositories easier from within VS?

Because Visual Studio already has very good integration with git. I probably only use git from the command line once every couple of months.

mariusmg• 11 years ago

Yeah, not sure about this either. What's exactly the point in having that Github UI in VS ?

A IDE is for writing code not integrating all kind of crap into it......

doctoboggan• 11 years ago

A IDE is for writing code not integrating all kind of crap into it......

The "I" in IDE stands for integrated

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure "integrating all kind of crap into it" is the distinction between an integrated development environment and other environments for writing code, like a simple programmer's editor (though the line is somewhat fuzzy, and programmer's editors also tend to integrate all kind of stuff, and provide extension points to integrate more.)

pimlottc• 11 years ago

Quick access to revision history is a huge aid in understanding code.

hm8• 11 years ago

GitHub gearing for a Microsoft acquisition OR am I reading too much?

landr0id• 11 years ago

Definitely reading into it too much.

astrodust• 11 years ago

Given how a lot of Microsoft's competitors use GitHub, it'd be disastrous to acquire it.

chimeracoder2• 11 years ago

Probably reading too much, in this case.

But since you mention it it'd make a lot of sense for Microsoft to want to buy Github.

Microsoft has been doing a lot of cool stuff engineering-wise in recent years. They've released so many FOSS projects I've lost track[0]. But they still suffer from a problem of being "uncool" because of their past reputation. Which was deserved, but they've changed a lot[1]. Microsoft needs a new brand for their FOSS work, because the Microsoft brand is badly tainted in the FOSS world.

Github is one of the few companies that could earn them respect in the FOSS world if they were to acquire them (and of course, not screw everything up).

[0] Heck, I've literally lost track of the number of FOSS things they've released this week

[1] Fifteen years ago, could you imagine Microsoft hosting a launch party for Debian? Because that's what they did this last weekend: http://openness.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/21/microsoft-debi...

click170• 11 years ago

IMO it would tarnish Github more than it would redeem Microsoft.

You don't become cool by buying the cool new gadget-of-the-week just as you don't become cool by buying a cool company.

Ill be comfortable calling them cool when they've demonstrated they no longer follow Embrace Extend Extinguish but until then they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

As far as I'm concerned they realized they tried to move to fast into the extinguishing phase so they're taking a step back into the extend phase. Im not falling for it.

jlarocco• 11 years ago

If Microsoft bought GitHub, my first thought would be that GitHub was selling out, not that Microsoft was suddenly respectable.

The "new" Microsoft is a lot better than the old Microsoft, but it's still not a company I feel comfortable doing business with.

robotnoises• 11 years ago

Cool!

Forgive me, but what is the advantage of buying Github enterprise and then having it hosted in Azure? I was under the impression that most enterprise customers were interested in self hosting.

jsmthrowaway• 11 years ago

Azure is self hosting. If you have on-prem, it makes sense to host on physical gear, but most startups aren't at that phase of their lifecycle. GHE vs GitHub for me is a data lifecycle decision, and even with GHE on Azure, you have more control over your data than in public GitHub.

Influencing factors can be regulatory, policy, SLA, that sort of thing. A prior employer had a blanket policy against intellectual property in a public service no matter the security, for example. GitHub has reliability issues lately as well.

One practical thing I've heard is that it's really easy to accidentally make a repo public on GitHub (I agree).

willthames• 11 years ago

Another example is the regulatory requirement for data sovereignty to ensure data remains under the data protection laws of the organisation's country.

With hosted Github you have no choice - data will presumably live on mainland US. With Azure/AWS/whatever, you can host your data in the most suitable location (always worth checking the contracts though)

tacos2• 11 years ago

Unified VPN (see Azure "Virtual Network" or Amazon VPC), unified offsite management, low latency deploys, restrictions your clients may impose on you wrt data security.

"Self hosting" increasingly means "inside my hacked-together cloud, not yours"

saurik• 11 years ago

The software will not be randomly modified when you are least prepared to deal with productivity changes and you can avoid having to wait for GitHub to respond to outages (while with Azure you might have an SLA, or are simply running other parts of your key infrastructure there and thereby already have them as a point of failure in your workflow). I will also say that you might trust a generic computation and storage provider more than you trust a specific service to not be mining your data (for the common "I want to host it myself as I don't trust you to not steal my stuff" issue).

aceperry• 11 years ago

Looks like a step in the right direction, where a lot of other developers already are. When they were pushing TFS, I didn't know if it was a 'me too' kind of move, or an attempt to provide an MS proprietary solution, or what. But getting in step with a lot of other developers, and hopefully playing nice, will get them a seat at the table with all developers, instead of projecting an attitude of: the world revolves around us. MS has been making some remarkable announcements at this Build conference, and making it easier for developers to get into MS technologies as well. This is a much better approach than when Ballmer was CEO.

Improving the GitHub Workflow for the Microsoft Community

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