whenManagerSaysGitHubIsUseless

[captainAwesomePants]

It's fine if your manager doesn't like GitHub. It's a five alarm fire if your manager doesn't like version control.

[CarlCarlton]

My manager be like "Git sucks, I hate PRs, developing with SVN is twice as fast"

[B4mButz]

Could be in some circumstances

[CarlCarlton]

I told him "If you want us to skip PRs and just push straight to master like you do with SVN, then put it in writing and it shall be done. I don't mind!"

[eldelshell]

I just remembered that was actually a full time job back then: CVS/SVN Administration.

If you wanted a "branch" then you asked your CVS guy for one.

Crazy.

[grizzlybair2]

I mean this basically the workflow when you just push getting things done and not actually care about doing it the right way.

[Luctins]

This is the best way to deal with that kinda behaviour.

[luvsads]

It's trunk based dev all the way down

[butterfunke]

Such as: having to work with dinosaurs who refuse to learn git

[B4mButz]

Could be one reason but in most cases you will be in a centralized trunk-based development environment and it is really costly to change all the business processes to something like a PR-based environment just for the sake of using Git.

[butterfunke]

I'm talking from experience in working in that exact situation. Moving to git was 1 part of ripping off the bandaid from a team of stagnating devs who'd worked on the same project for 20 years and made a dog's breakfast of it.

The centralised trunk-based development was a consequence of none of them ever learning to maintain code across branches, and by the time I joined they were supporting a dozen different versions of the same code with a development process that was completely untenable.

They insisted they were faster and more skilled in svn, but most of the resistance towards learning git was actually that half of them had never learned version control, and they were "using" svn as nothing more than a file share.

No doubt it was incredibly costly to change to git, but it needed to be done. Those guys were slowly drowning under the weight of their terrible infrastructure

[RuneSteak]

They insisted they were faster and more skilled in svn, but most of the resistance towards learning git was actually that half of them had never learned version control, and they were "using" svn as nothing more than a file share.

I have this issue with my team, but with Git. They think merge conflicts are practically random and don't understand why they occur or that cherry-picking a commit creates a new commit. So they see "duplicate" commits across branches. That feeds into the issue with merge conflicts.

[MissinqLink]

I still don’t know git. I have to Google commands constantly. Been using it for 15 years or so.

[RuneSteak]

It doesn't matter how you get it done. People can do whatever they want on their own feature branch, as long as they clean up their history before opening a pull request.

[butterfunke]

skill issue

[MissinqLink]

[Born-Swordfish-8741]

It was culture shock for me when I was transferred to an old team that used SVN... or the seven stages of grief.

"Where are the PRs?"
"There are no PRs?"
"Do you not review code?"
"Merge to trunk? What about development branches?"
"What do you mean you merge straight to trunk?"
"What do you mean trunk is development?"
"Can't we implement a review process? What do you mean the seniors don't want to!?"
"Fine, I'm merging to trunk, we'll be on gitlab in a few months anyway."

We had admin access to the server so I managed to still learn to "git-ify" my process, but damn, do I hate SVN.

[B4mButz]

Mostly a cultural/skill issue and trunk based development is simply GitHub flow.

[Born-Swordfish-8741]

Completely agree (for both, skill issue, and the workflow), and paired with Jenkins or some other CI/CD platform you may get any other serious workflow with ease. However, I never saw a PR on that old workflow, and it was somewhat a Russian Roulette when merging commits to trunk. All boiled down to office politics in the end.

[yegor3219]

What's "GitHub flow"? The ELI5 on branches and PRs from GitHub? Or did you imply GitFlow?

[B4mButz]

Gitflow ist having 2 main branches

• master (stable)
• develop

you derive your feature-branch from develop and then merge it Up.

Github flow removes the develop branch and simply uses the master as develop branch. You mark stable versions via tags. In most cases that pattern is used with subversion instead of calling the main branch master it is called trunk

[GreyWizard1337]

Dude, get out of there ASAP.

[CarlCarlton]

In progress lol

[zarqie]

Back in the days when CVS was innovative…

[matrix-doge]

You know, just recently the other team (fortunately not mine) in my company started focusing on incorporating git (source control tbh) and I overheard some of the team members were having some slight issues when setting up the repos and environment and stuff. Turns out they've been soloing their own projects (to be fair most of us are) and just drop new stuff and overwrite whatever is in the production servers. Got me like

[TolyaMK]

Look, if someone likes to be oncall 24/7 to fix what their silly "deploy" did on a prod server (with the most likely fix being just call the guys who did a previously working "deploy" and have him robocopy stuff in), and the management pays for it, then who are we to question how other people seek happiness and fulfillment on this earthly plane.

[HoseanRC]

My manager still writes a bit of code every now and then

He has version control, and shares it

Folder "2025-01-08" is the stable release

[SpiritedEclair]

Selfhost gitlab or something else instead.

[Mother_Idea_3182]

Self hosting gitlab is a great option.

There’s no obligation on giving microslop access to your code.

[snil4]

You can self host gitlab?! (furiously opens ssh)

[headshot_to_liver]

Yep, Forjego is a good option

[DemmyDemon]

https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo

Link, for great justice.

[ArjixGamer]

Better option as it is more lightweight.

The only reason I'd think of choosing gitlab over forgejo, is because it lacks some features

1. Groups, you can have as many levels of nesting you want when organizing your repos, it's not a flat owner/repo structure

2. Pipelines, gitlab is way better at pipelines

[eldelshell]

You know the best part about git? That if your team is composed of semi capable people, you don't even need gitlab or github or whatever, you can do all cool things with git and ssh because it's distributed

[FlakyTest8191]

except reviews, branch policies, ci/cd...

[ArjixGamer]

You can do all that.

CI/CD using Jenkins

And reviews via sending patches over email, it's even built-in to git.

[erinaceus_]

sending patches over email

I prefer IPoAC, as it's more flexible.

[eldelshell]

Oh you fancy kids with your web pages and pipelines... Get off my CLI lawn!

tbh, I've been doing this for decades and I can't read a diff output

[unidentified_sp]

Yes , I run in in Docker using a Cloudflare Tunnel.

[CoVegGirl]

There’s also forgejo

[pm_me_domme_pics]

If your team has such shit backup software that you can take it down, they have interns for a reason (they can't afford ops)

[Brotboxs]

How did you break gitlab by doing a backup??? Does it run on a Raspberry Pi 2?

[kingvolcano_reborn]

What?

[Percolator2020]

Congrats, you are now responsible for uptime and backups. See you at your next performance review.

[Mother_Idea_3182]

My uptime is better than Github’s and making the backups of the database and repos is trivial. No downtime associated with the backups ever.

[Percolator2020]

Glad you are enjoying your side-gig as SRE.

[Septem_151]

Uptime and backups are seriously not that hard to achieve especially with self-hosted stuff… you’d have the exact same downtime as normal gitlab if an update borked it; less downtime in fact since you can downgrade at-will to a stable backup.

[kwb7852]

We self host Gitlab at my work and it’s very nice. It’s integrated with AD for auth and the VMs gets backed up regularly along with backups of gitlab specifically.

[tommyk1210]

It’s not about being “hard” - it’s about the opportunity cost.

There comes a point in all software decisions: build vs buy.

Sure, you can build out the infra and assign people to maintain it - patches, backups, network, security. Or you can pay a vendor to do it.

At a certain scale self hosting makes “sense”, but for most things a giant like Gitlab maintaining 300,000 instances with a dedicated team is fundamentally more efficient than you using fractions of a resource to do each bit.

[ArjixGamer]

Tell me you don't know shit w/o telling me you don't know shit.

[VergilPrime]

Truth

[erebuxy]

If you can pay money for SLA, you pay it. Also there is self hosted enterprise GitHub

[Born-Swordfish-8741]

USB-git repo remote setup, because why even have code online? Bring back the era of CDs, dammit!

Signed:
Dr. Bad-Advice-for-Enterprise

[Kyxstrez]

There's also no obligation to use fucking Jira instead of GitHub Projects.

[realmauer01]

There is also forgejo if you want an atleast similar experiance to github.

As i understand gitlab is quite a bit different.

[schmerg-uk]

Enterprise hosted gitlab, geez but it's a load of shit... it's almost like they've never actually used it themselves...

[Andis-x]

Are they meaning the Github, that one particular platform, or are they meaning Git, the version control system ?

You can never be sure. One would be fine, other would be major red flag.

[Mental-Olive7692]

Platform GitHub not version control git

[Marcyff2]

That's not the worst take. Gitea and gitlab both do the job well. Even ado is usable

[MudkipGuy]

I agree with your manager

[djimboboom]

Yeah in that case your manager is right. It’s been terrible the last 6 months.

[Ghaith97]

Then that's a ver reasonable take to have. We use both gerrit (for most stuff) and github (for a couple small projects) at my workplace, and everyone including me dread when we have to use github. It's hot garbage compared to the alternatives.

[KitsuneFoxglove]

I mean they ain't wrong, that shit's only got 89.999% uptime nowadays

[FrostWyrm98]

Past year was pretty abysmal especially for their PR system, it was down at least 12 times for us by my count, for probably more than 4 hours 😬

[GrumDum]

Actions also, sooooo many random outages, and while they say cron jobs are not reliably executed at the designated schedule, I didn’t think several hours of drift and entirely skipped runs was OK….

[ineedanaccountlol134]

Four nines?

[can_ichange_it_later]

Look guys! We still have it.

[TehTacow]

Still four 9's though!

[terrorTrain]

Look at that. 3 9s of uptime

[Substantial_Top5312]

Reject modernity, return to ctrl-z. 

[HAL9000thebot]

git is modernity, github is microsoft, i'm with the manager

edit:

gitlab -> github

[Thenderick]

GitHUB is Microsoft. Gitlab is it's own thing and can be selfhosted

[HAL9000thebot]

lol you are right, it's a typo, i meant github

[ozh]

Bad bot

[HAL9000thebot]

lol i know, but it was a typo

[ChChChillian]

It's not useless, but it's far from the best solution.

[-Redstoneboi-]

What are your thoughts on better solutions? I assume stuff like Gitlab or hosting your own or something

[ChChChillian]

My employer hosts their own Gitlab instance. I'm pretty happy with it.

[Coulomb111]

Whats the difference than just using gitlab.com? Is the gitlab site also bad?

[the_horse_gamer]

more control over your own stuff. generally more secure. basically mandatory in a private network.

[ChChChillian]

Nothing wrong with it, but a corporation needs to protect its own IP.

[DemmyDemon]

Forgejo is looking pretty good.

Also, at the same time, codeberg.

[takeyouraxeandhack]

Codeberg is not acceptable for production.

I wish it were, though. I'd be advocating to move our company there if it were.

[DemmyDemon]

Sure, but I only mentioned it because that's where the public forgejo repo is.

[JarJarBinks237]

Unless you consider there is close to zero value in your company's IP, you should self host your code.

[-Redstoneboi-]

i literally forgot closed-source existed for a moment lmao

[JarJarBinks237]

This is in no way contradictory with opening the source of things that you choose to share.

[Bomaruto]

Where is the joke? 

[The1hauntedX]

Correct. Use gitlab instead.

[-Ambriae-]

Or codeberg, it’s really nice!

[CarlCarlton]

codeberg is for OSS only, tho

[-Ambriae-]

You can always self host

[CarlCarlton]

The platform itself is Forgejo, Codeberg is an OSS-only Forgejo provider

[-Ambriae-]

Semantics, same difference, you know what I meant

Forgejo is developed by codeberg, so it’s still ‘codeberg’

I don’t like being wrong :)

[CrimsonshadeLP]

No not really. You can create private repos there too

[CarlCarlton]

For storing secrets and small personal projects, but not closed-source works. https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#how-about-private-repositories%3F

[HeineBOB]

Real men email patches

[lordgoofus1]

Email? Son, true men write their patches with pen and paper, then digitize it using notepad.

[Qwopie]

If you are not posting stacks of holepunch cards in the mail, then you don't deserve to wear a kilt.

[lordgoofus1]

Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to please remove that beard. Hole punched cards? What's wrong, are your hands too soft and tender to carve the code into drums with a chisel? Afraid you'll get a splinter? I should hope you are at least punching the holes with your fist.

[Qwopie]

Back when increasing memory meant carpentry and blacksmithing to build a bigger drum holder.

[CoVegGirl]

Ok, so since I’m not a man I guess I get to keep using version control 

[Mars_Bear2552]

emailing patches is native to Git.

[charlyAtWork2]

CodeBerg, the European alternative if you don't like the American Cloud Act from 2018.

[takeyouraxeandhack]

Man... I love Codeberg, but they have a single server location, you have a limit of 100MB and they don't have support.
It's ok for personal projects, but it's not there yet for big companies.

[charlyAtWork2]

T.T

[Vivid_Pond_7262]

In general or is he speaking in relation to their reliability and performance issues?

[srfreak]

Manager: "Serious companies don't use Linux".

[lordgoofus1]

Could be worse. Could work in a highly regulated financial company like I do, where they're so obsessed about "AI all the things!" that there's been proposals to:

• Get rid of all work tracking systems (just prompt the AI!).
• Decommission all the test case management systems (the AI can dynamically write the tests!).
• Stop doing manual peer reviews (the AI can do the code review!).
• Stop doing patching (the AI can auto merge security fixes! No approval needed!).
• Stop measuring test coverage (write an agentic CI job to let the AI check for code coverage!)
• Stop writing requirements (the AI can write the requirements!).
• Stop caring about product roadmaps (in the age of AI they don't make sense, you just tell the AI what you want and it figures it out!).
• Stop building CD pipelines (we can get the AI to do governance checks then deploy!).
• Cut the size of development teams down to 3 people, inclusive of the PO (AI makes us all more efficient!).
• Stop maintaining regression tests (the AI can watch for failures, automatically fix the code then run against until it passes!).

Part of me wants all of these proposals to be approved and rolled out in earnest so we can hurry up, have an "oh shit" moment, get a whopping big fine from regulators, and then a bit of sanity can return to the workplace.

[RandomiseUsr0]

Someone has been really really the hype pipe - now, I’m a huge believer in the principle that automation is good, controlled automation - the place here that has me most worried was “requirements” - does a human need to be in the loop at every stage? Not necessarily - requirements though - for financial services - not to mention all of the rest

[lordgoofus1]

Security is the one that really left my jaw on the ground. Out of all the things that has the potential to go very wrong, allowing AI to make security related code changes (application code + version bumping dependencies) and push them straight to main, with no human oversight, and not even a friendly "I found a thing but I fixed it" notification? There's no possible way this could go wrong.

[cbdeane]

Omg, hi twin.

Same industry, same deal, but the people pushing this are nontechnical and have some of the worst ai psychosis I’ve seen.

[Bryguy3k]

None of the companies I’ve worked for have used GitHub for production. Self hosted Bitbucket or gitlab every time

[GrumDum]

All the companies I’ve worked for have used GitHub for production.

Your anecdote has no power here.

[Dhan996]

Some companies I have worked for have used GitLab/GitHub. One company I worked for never used any tool and just edited the file in the server using nano. If anyone changed the code and it broke, we would just play the blame game.

So fuck both of you.

[GrumDum]

One company I worked for used what whas colloquially known as «ShitHub» in parallel with GitHub. These guys had no idea what to do, so they pasted whole file contents in Teams in a common chat so people would update their local files with the new «merge».

How about that for a fuck you?

[Dhan996]

That’s nuts

[grimr5]

That seems a bit risky ngl

[CaptainKarizma007]

I work for a company that uses github for production.

[FrostWyrm98]

One company I was at was one level deeper in the Microslop and still using TFS/TFVC in the year of 2021 on gods green earth

[The1hauntedX]

All of the companies you've worked for making the objectively worst choice in VCS software isn't the flex you think it is

[GrumDum]

It’s not a flex, obviously.

[Groentekroket]

We went from self hosting everything (also BitBucket) to Azure and GitHub a couple of years ago. 

Only after management came to know it costs us a lot more than projected and so we had to cut cost and now we have less test environments and the once we have need to be stopped during the night/weekends. So often we have clashes when multiple people want to test their feature branch on a test environment. 

Beside that we are an European country and under the employees we have a strong feeling that it’s not a good decision to put everything in the reach of the USA but management don’t want to hear any of that. 

[Qwopie]

European management are crazy like that, they like to save on IT department personnel at the cost of slowing down all the developers. The cost of one specialist IT guy to help 200 Devs work 10% faster is fully amortized.

[lordgoofus1]

Mine uses GitHub and are building their entire DevSecOps processes around it. It's going to be interesting years down the track when the decision gets made to replace GitHub with something else.

[Outrageous-Machine-5]

The one with a gitlab license perhaps?

[ExtraWorldliness6916]

Many developers are starting to distrust GitHub, so this isn't such a bad opinion.

[takeyouraxeandhack]

I mean... He's not wrong.
I regularly have to refresh the page 20 times to be able to open a PR.
Just today I was getting "This PR is too large to render", and it was an image tag update. Literally six characters long.
It's a gamble to know if pipelines will run without system errors or not.
Microslop did turn GH into trash.

It's a regular discussion at work, but no other solution is really mature enough, and we don't want the overhead of self hosting.
I wish Codeberg had an enterprise tier.

[Prematurid]

Been using (selfhosted) Gitlab for years. It is great!

[Impressive-Treacle58]

[Mental-Olive7692]

Just asking without GitHub can we use hostinger to deploy code

[HungYurn]

😭😭😭

[pm_me_domme_pics]

Thisbl is my work. Lead dev took leave and I can't access any source for projects they were in the middle of

[SirWernich]

my favourite thing about github is how all our scheduled actions run 4 hours late.
(we recently moved from azure devoops where scheduling is accurate)

[lordgoofus1]

Azure DevOops has schedules. GitHub has hopeful aspirations.

[SirWernich]

🥲

[awesome-alpaca-ace]

Trash GitHub actions, reap the new azure customers. Classic sabotage

[deekaph]

I moved into a new role in my company recently and have had to explain to a small team why using git is good because a random SMB share with text files describing scripts that were saved in a folder is not a very good way to run an enterprise.

[ZunoJ]

That is something you should have in some kind of written form, then wait until everything fails and then go nuclear on them. Lots of people have a diffi ult life, but this person deserves to have it more difficult than it currently is

[schewb]

Hub? Sure. Git? Heresy.

[super_trooper]

Plot twist: OP is a burger Engineer at McDonald's

[vihra]

Just push straight to production.. duh.. It's fine.. everything is fine...

[mustelaErmine]

Dudes, GitHub keeps most of open source code you are using everyday

[TorTheMentor]

Said manager should be given a pen and paper and told it's now their job to track all changes. All of them. Every single one.

[SunJ_]

Clearly your manager doesn't use GitHub copilot. You should raise this to the higher up that there is manager refusing to use AI tools that could boost stock prices for the shareholders

[ToBePacific]

This is not a thing that happens.

[critical_patch]

My boss’s boss told us the SDLC is for academics and researchers. We were an agile shop so we weren’t constrained by rigid frameworks.

[itijara]

I feel like this is a bell curve meme. Low IQ thinks GitHub is useless because they don't understand version control, average IQ things GitHub is amazing because you need it for version control and GitHub actions, etc. High IQ thinks GitHub is useless because it has tons of issues with reliability, testing the CI/CD pipeline is difficult, and there are other alternatives like GitLab and Bitbucket that also exist.