[bellowsgulch]

I’m certain I’m up there in the 1% of users, or close to it, that are writing software daily in terms of consistent prolonged volume of work and work that is actually used by others over the past nearly 20 years based on user activity statistics I’ve collected.

I, too, am a fairly, but not immediate early user of GitHub. Despite GitHub’s poor metrics, I am still shipping, because writing software doesn’t require GitHub.

Hashimoto’s comments sound disturbed and I hope he finds some peace, but if he wasn’t who he was and you read these comments, you’d think this person had a problem. So, I think he does.

[aprilnya]

„I don’t use any of GitHub’s non-git features, so if you use them you have a problem”

[m-ee]

He’s pretty obviously referring to the extreme emotional reaction Hashimoto had, not his choice to use a different git solution

[joombaga]

Who are you quoting?

[dspillett]

That was paraphrasing, rather than quoting.

The post being replied to essentially said “I don't use the features that have been regularly broken in recent times, or where the features I do use [core git] were broken it luckily didn't affect me, so anyone thinking of leaving has a mental problem”.

Or to paraphrase the old joke:

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: The sunlight through the windows here is working fine, if you can't see where you are that must be a “you” problem.

[ulbu]

"Writing software doesn't require GitHub". Well, if they do not need whatever is specific to github and claim that someone who sorely lacks these features has a mental problem...

[codingdave]

To be fair, the author of the post said the same thing. From the other thread on HN, they themselves said: "Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. "

[GlacierFox]

"Hashimoto’s comments sound disturbed and I hope he finds some peace..."

You don't often see the completely unhinged ad hominem 'faux mental health concern' segway here on Hacker News to try and paint someone as 'disturbed'. Thought that was mainly a Reddit thing people do.

[otterley]

s/segway/segue/

[GlacierFox]

thanks for that correction. I had early 2000's novel transportation on the mind.

[dspillett]

> because writing software doesn’t require GitHub.

If your workflow doesn't need the features that have had reliability problems over recent times (which includes some of the basic collaborative features), is GitHub even the right tool for your task? If not, then your judgement of others for complaining about the issues is presumptuous to the point of being somewhat obnoxious.

[Aurornis]

> I, too, am a fairly, but not immediate early user of GitHub. Despite GitHub’s poor metrics, I am still shipping, because writing software doesn’t require GitHub.

GitHub’s downtime is a problem for issue tracking, PR merging, contributing and reviewing PRs, and more.

Your exact point was already pre-addressed in the blog post because it’s so predictable that some would completely miss the point. GitHub’s downtime isn’t about stopping you from writing code on your own machine.

> Hashimoto’s comments sound disturbed and I hope he finds some peace, but if he wasn’t who he was and you read these comments, you’d think this person had a problem. So, I think he does.

What a gross ad hominem about someone’s mental health. Please don’t do this.

[torben-friis]

>if he wasn’t who he was and you read these comments, you’d think this person had a problem. So, I think he does.

Honestly, I thought you were demeaning him to defend GitHub. But after reading the article, it does seem like his emotional reaction is not aligned with the situation. Just saying it openly for others who get the same impression I did.

That said, GitHub can be a full time job for many (handling and responding issues, reviews, and so on, depending on the size of the project). It's also not unheard of to have PR descriptions and comments as part of documentation rather than commit messages. So GitHub's availability is certainly extremely disruptive to many companies.

[alexjplant]

No, calling him "disturbed" was entirely out of line. As with everything it's not GitHub per se that is causing him consternation but the loss of what it represents:

> “Some people doom scroll social media. I've been doom scrolling GitHub issues since before that was a word,” he admitted. “On vacations I'd have bookmarks of different projects on GitHub I wanted to study. Not just source code, but OSS processes, how other maintainers react to difficult situations. Etc. Believe it or not, I like this.”

> “I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I've been lashing out. Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal,” he wrote.

He is a passionate person whose identity is heavily invested in community and technical achievement. He's upset about his world being disrupted, not that GitHub as a product is failing him. This is how high-performing people are - they care deeply about their work. Could you imagine leveling these charges at a visual artist when they complain about a company messing with their favorite pencil? Or a saxophonist when their reed of choice is discontinued? It's petty and reductionist.

[torben-friis]

>Could you imagine leveling these charges at a visual artist when they complain about a company messing with their favorite pencil? Or a saxophonist when their reed of choice is discontinued? It's petty and reductionist.

If that person is lashing out and hurting people around him as a consequence, then yeah, I'd say that's not healthy. Unless he has a smaller barrier than I do for what he considers lashing out, and just refers to online complains.