Registering my dissatisfaction with GitHub

Mini-post. I read Mitchell Hashimoto’s blog post yesterday and it resonated with me; this part in particular: Since then, I’ve opened GitHub every single day. Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years. Over half my life. A handful of exceptions in there (I’d love to see the data), but I can’t imagine more than a week per year. I can’t claim quite the same seniority (I joined in 2012; my user ID is 3059210), but I think I can fairly say that GitHub is both my favorite and the single most important service I’ve interacted with, both as a hobbyist maintainer and as a professional software engineer. I wouldn’t have the friends, connections, career, &c. that I have today if it wasn’t for GitHub. Despite that, using GitHub has become a thoroughly dissatisfying experience over the last 18 months. I don’t know exactly why that is1, but that is the brute reality. I now frequently interact with GitHub with a defensive, rather than optimistic posture: I assume that things will be…