You're joking, but I'd actually find that kinda fun. Every day / every commit would be excessive, but maybe reminding you of large PRs/issues you closed this time last year?
I'd like that feature. There's no reason why GitHub can't have a little more pizzazz. A lot of us spend a great deal of time writing code, why not have some fun with it? As long as the core features remain intact and unencumbered with trivial things, I for one welcome the additions GitHub has been making and look forward to their continuing development.
Without getting into too deep a discussion of features, this development attitude of “implement everything, let them use what they want” is historically awful. The developers lose focus on what they are making, the users lose focus on what they are using. Eventually a platform that does a great job of any of the ten things that yours does poorly is a superior product and its creators are praised for shipping such a clean and minimal product.
I think this kind of features are better served as browser extensions or maybe from the GitHub marketplace(?), as in not part of the core product but with an easy activation by the user and easy to discover. No need to pollute the product- I already use multiple browser extensions to declutter and simplify GitHubs UI
It's a status update for your profile page, what's with the slippery slope arguments here? It's not like they implemented a social feed where you can post updates, making it more like a legitimate social network.
What? I was referring to the development philosophy that I saw reflected in the above comment. I even said that I was not referring to any specific features, including this one.
Can I not simply wire it up to all the other bloody stupid status displaying apps that pervade my life?
Set phone to DND. Set auto responder on email client(s). Set away status on various desktop apps. Set away on various web apps. Set away on work mobile (cell) apps. Go home.
Actually I don't bother with any of that. I don't answer the phone or any apps when I'm not "there" or can't be arsed or am busy. It's what people have done for millennia.
Isn't that originally all twitter was? At least that's how I remember it being described when it first came out: "It's a service to store your AIM-style status messages"
Now I just need a Winamp plugin that changes my status to tell everyone what song I'm currently listening to, and I'll feel like I'm back in the 90s. :)
I hate to say it but I feel like the 90s was a better time all around for the casual computer user.
- You had total customization over your computer, every app was skinnable including Windows or MacOS itself
- Linux was in a great spot, finally becoming usable as a desktop OS with a ton of fun toys and UI/UX experiments that got a lot of us into Linux before we knew about CLIs
- Products were sold per-unit instead of *aaS, so when you bought something, you knew you could use it as long as you needed to
- Social networks didn't exist, so if you wanted to interact with people, you had to learn something - which is what made geocities and later MySpace fun, since people had to learn a little HTML in order to update their friends on their current status, and could use that new skill to decorate their "home" page
I miss the 90s. I want to bring that back. That's why I got my kids PICO-8, at least it's a little taste of the good old days!
Except those are rose tinted glasses youre wearing imo. Linux isnt worse today than it was in the days of yore, it just hasnt kept up as well in your mind. Computing as a whole has improved so much that linux couldnt keep up with your higher expectations.
Linux today isn't worse, but laptops are much more prevalent now, and they're harder to support drivers for than desktops. Especially Apple laptops which I've been using for a long time now, they're notorious for not being that easy to get Linux running smoothly on. Some people can manage it but more people have trouble. I've wasted dozens and dozens of hours trying to get Linux working smoothly on this thing and I just gave up a few years ago. But when desktops were king and the internet just started to become mainstream and everyone was flooding into that new space, it was a great time for desktop Linux.
Yep. I've been running dual boot OSX/mint for some time and god the hardware has never been happy about it. Especially with regard to the GPU and multi-monitor support but I suspect also with regard to battery usage and other power issues. It always ran just cool enough that I did not do anything about how hot it was. The display issues cropped up so that I could at least anticipate when it would occur and try to minimize that. GPU computing... well these old macbook pros with Nvidia chips were dogs anyway. Would a windows laptop fair any better with Linux? Honestly asking because I really want a solid Linux laptop for HPC/computational engineering development but not sure what to do.
Wow - that is interesting to hear. Let me toss in a caveat by saying that I had 2 different multi-monitor setups that I transferred between while running straight off the machine quite often as well. Typically problems would crop up after shifting to or from the non-mac monitor setup. Never tested the cam on the linux side.
Compiz is certainly from the 2000s. I think I only managed to make it work on any computer of mine at the end of the decade, but people were all saying nice things about it since 2002-2003.
By 1997 I was able to get X running with xclock and xterm. Any other X application would freeze my computer due to sheer lack of CPU.
Linux in the 90s was figuring out which distribution had usable versions of the software you wanted to use, and hoping that an update to one package didn’t break everything else.
That, or rolling your own distro from scratch and spending ALL YOUR TIME maintaining your Linux install somthere was no time left to do the stuff you actually wanted to do.
Oh look, updating my windows manager means sound no longer works. I guess that’s three hours I need to invest to get my music player working again.
A chat feature might be ok, actually, though if we're going to have more IM applications and protocols, I'd rather have a general-purpose one, not one specific to github.
Who exactly wanted this feature? Are they going to try monetizing Github with data mining? Mining commit history for personal metadata could be a (thoroughly despicable) gold mine.
All sarcasm aside, this feature is absolutely the wrong direction. Github may have some things in common with social networks, but it operates on a longer-term scale. It's the difference between a book and a paragraph. People who care about this sort of daily minutia can find it plentifully on Twitter and Facebook. Github is great for finding out what people have been up to, without caring about what they're doing this second, and that's what was great about it.
I think you misunderstand the feature. You don't have to constantly update your status. You can set it once in a while to show what you're up to... if you want to.
And what else is the point of that except to let other people know about your hour-to-hour business? Their gif uses "Shipping [software]" as an example, and even has a "Busy" checkbook they they demonstrate ticking off. When features exist, people use them, and when some people use them, other people are socially pressured into using them to conform to peer expectations. This is the beginning of a bad thing for Github unless MS changes direction. That said, Github arose out of the ashes of Sourceforge completely and utterly failing to deliver frictionless value (and the advent of git), so maybe this will eventually provide an opportunity for an existing (or new?) competitor to rise up and take Github's place in the space of "simple network of git repos".
Usually I do want to know about the hour-to-hour business of the people I am professionally developing software with, and I want them to know about mine. When I send a code review to people elsewhere in the company and it's timely, I want some expectation of whether they're around or I should find another reviewer.
My heart sank a little when I saw this appear on my profile last night. I don't understand which demographic this is meant to target or what the point of it is, I just can't think of a single reasonable use case for it.
> I just can't think of a single reasonable use case for it.
MS didn't acquire GitHub because they cared at all about the technology. It was the exact same strategy as LinkedIn. It's all about tracking us, the developer community, and keeping their finger on the pulse of where things are going. Generating more click event data to further profile your tastes for future commercial use by Microsoft. What other possible reason could there be?
MS cares about developer mindshare. Through GitHub they have access to the worlds largest software developer social network (well it's almost a social network). The large number of open source projects on the site provide a moat and a network effect.
The demographic it's targeting is people who use GitHub for daily work professionally, not volunteer open source maintainers (just as the demographic Slack targets is people who are paid to have Slack open 8 hours a day, not community chat rooms, and their product decisions make more sense in that context). But even volunteer open source maintainers are likely to find "On vacation until mm/dd" useful.
I can hazard a reasonable guess based on my observation of various executive life forms and, oddly, The Office. I obviously do not have data to back it up, but random clicks seem to find random non-code related items on GitHub ( I think HN had pizza recipe example kinda drove that point further for me ). From this I can only gather that someone decided that GitHub should be more.. fun, social place where you interact, interface and collaborate in real time. Just be happy no one announced they are moving everything to a semi-public blockchain.
If you maintain OSS projects, this can be a useful tool to communicate that you are working on a particular, often-requested feature. Or perhaps, that you are on vacation, in hiatus, or sick.
Likewise, this could be a useful feature in the context of enterprise GitHub or private repos used by organizations. Seeing the current status of a coworker without leaving GitHub is a nice plus, especially if they start integrating statuses with tag autocompletion.
Now if they just evolve their "discussions" (formerly issues) into "live discussions", and then add one more feature to allow separating it by "tag" or maybe "topic" per repo, they can pretty much replace Slack.
It’s pretty clear that public non-chronological, timelines, posts, profile pages, and messaging will follow, along with a mess of spammy recruiters. Then, leetcode style scoring so that employers who can’t interview their way out of a paper bag know who to hire. Can’t wait to see where else they’ll stuff “sponsored content”.
This is a good reminder that I don't use GitHub the way they expect me to. I don't use their notifications. I don't really ever look at my profile. Certainly not enough that I would go to it regularly to (even think to) update my "status".
I'm wary of "slippery slope" arguments but I do NOT want a(nother) social network in my life. It's hard to imagine how this doesn't evolve into GitHub Chat, etc, especially with GitLab buying Gitter, etc. No thank you. Thankfully there are ever increasing (and OSS) forge platforms, it seems.
It is a bit amusing, however, to imagine hypothetical horrible, naggy, even more self-promotional LinkedIn/GitHub integrations.
Contrary to the opinions here, I find this to be a very useful feature for the same reason I like vacation auto-responders in email. No I couldn't care less if you're "feeling the groove" or some nonsense. But a friendly reminder to someone assigning me a review that I'm in vacation, or swamped in meetings all day would be very useful to me and my team.
Also as irritating as vacation mail can be, at least now I know that you aren’t talking to me because you aren’t here, rather than you’re just giving me the silent treatment because I made a disparaging comment about Tori Amos’s latest album.
I'm surprised everyone here missed the point by so much. This isn't a status update in the Facebook or Twitter sense. It's akin to the same feature that exists on Slack and GitLab already. It's useful to mark when you're on holiday or otherwise not working like usual, so teammates know what to expect from you.
Almost all of my open-source collaborations on Github have been so informal I wouldn't even tell anyone directly that I'm, say, away on vacation in the issues section, but I could see myself setting this status or appreciating that someone else set it.
Though I think HN is too old-hat to really understand how anyone could like these sorts of social features, and it's to their own detriment.
Seeing someone's status when you mention them, assign them a ticket, etc is a very welcome addition imo. The "taking time off my side projects" status example is amazingly spot-on as well.
I assume this is targeted more at companies who use GitHub for their internal code, where people collaborate at a much more systematic (and probably higher) pace, where planning time and deadlines are much more prevalent.
People use GitHub comments for communication also. Seeing a note next to people's names in a conversation if you cannot expect a timely reply from them is unarguably useful.
Looking at github to see if the maintainer is on holiday seems great to me. Perhaps my pull request isn’t complete junk, and the only reason it hasn’t been merged is that there’s nobody around to merge it?
The ONLY context in which this makes sense is allowing users to indicate whether they are looking for work or projects to contribute to. Let's hope all the excessive stuff (stories, timelines, etc) mentioned in these comments never come to fruition.
If you dislike this feature then you need to take ten seconds out of your time to submit feedback through 'set status' interface.
- maintainers are all on holidays, that PR is not getting touched this week
- the person who accepted that issue has not been active for a week, perhaps I can pick it up
- the person who accepted that issue is active today, maybe there will be a PR to review later! Check with them to see howmit’s going and maybe schedule some time tomorrow to review the PR
While we're griping about GitHub changes, why did they change the reaction emoji style? They look flat and enervated where before they were vibrant and visually distinct.
I see a lot of skepticism in this thread. That was my initial impression too, but I actually think this is a good feature now that I think about it.
As one example: it will be nice to know if a coworker is out of office or on extended PTO, like vacation. There are usually other "profiles" which display the same information in an organization, but this is a useful place for it too if you're about to e.g. tag someone in an Issue thread.
This is a really useful feature for indicating that an account is vestigial despite occasional blips of activity. I hope they implement something similar with LinkedIn.
GitHub now reminds you what commits you made on this day last year.
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