[GuiA]

Silly question ahead: I feel like this is a SQL JOIN (and 10 lines of Ruby for the view) that any web developer could ship in an afternoon or so.

With the above in mind, I imagine Github would ship dozens of such little features a month; and yet they don't, and when they do it warrants a blog post about it.

What am I missing here? Can someone enlighten me?

[skywhopper]

Real systems at Github's scale take far more effort to add features to than your gut instinct first stab at imagining how it's done. There's caching to consider, instrumentation to build, privacy and security to consider, UI decisions to make, performance implications, documentation, tests to write, and deployment details to finalize. This could very well represent a week or two of work for a developer plus some ops work thrown in.

That's not all that much effort, but Github's staff has plenty more to do: maintenance on existing code, bugs to fix, research to do, troubleshooting, improving older code, updating code for new architectural improvements, writing internal features that don't show up in the public UI, and there's also the fact that every feature you turn on means an ongoing commitment to maintain that feature for the forseeable future.

[steveklabnik]

User value and implementation effort are not correlated.

I'd turn the question on its head: why aren't you blogging about every little feature you've added?

[catmanjan]

True, this would be pretty quick to throw together, and I'm sure the GitHub guys do ship dozens of small features a month (less interesting ones perhaps?), but this one is fairly hidden - without this post I probably never would have found it.