GitHub 'No Longer a Place For Serious Work', Says Hashicorp Co-Founder (theregister.com) 51
Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub's frequent outages have made it "no longer a place for serious work," prompting him to move his Ghostty terminal emulator project elsewhere after 18 years on the platform. The Register reports: "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. The reason for his ire is the service has become unreliable. "For the past month I've kept a journal where I put an 'X' next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work," he wrote. "Almost every day has an 'X'. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage."
Hashimoto penned his post a few days before an April 28 incident that saw pull requests fail to complete due to an Elasticsearch SNAFU. Incidents like that mean Hashimoto has decided GitHub "is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day." "It's not a fun place for me to be anymore," he lamented. "I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software."
The developer says he wants GitHub to improve, but "I also want to code. And I can't code with GitHub anymore. I'm sorry. After 18 years, I've got to go." He's open to a return if GitHub can deliver "real results and improvements, not words and promises." But for now, he's working to move Ghostty to another collaborative code locker. "We have a plan but I'm also very much still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS)," Hashimoto wrote. "It'll take us time to remove all of our dependencies on GitHub and we have a plan in place to do it as incrementally as possible."
He's doing the equivalent of leaving a toothbrush at a former partner's house by leaving a read-only mirror of Ghostty on GitHub, and by keeping his personal projects on the Microsoft-owned service. But Hashimoto's moving his day job somewhere new. "Ghostty is where I, our maintainers, and our open source community are most impacted so that is the focus of this change. We'll see where it goes after that," he concluded.
Hashimoto penned his post a few days before an April 28 incident that saw pull requests fail to complete due to an Elasticsearch SNAFU. Incidents like that mean Hashimoto has decided GitHub "is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day." "It's not a fun place for me to be anymore," he lamented. "I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software."
The developer says he wants GitHub to improve, but "I also want to code. And I can't code with GitHub anymore. I'm sorry. After 18 years, I've got to go." He's open to a return if GitHub can deliver "real results and improvements, not words and promises." But for now, he's working to move Ghostty to another collaborative code locker. "We have a plan but I'm also very much still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS)," Hashimoto wrote. "It'll take us time to remove all of our dependencies on GitHub and we have a plan in place to do it as incrementally as possible."
He's doing the equivalent of leaving a toothbrush at a former partner's house by leaving a read-only mirror of Ghostty on GitHub, and by keeping his personal projects on the Microsoft-owned service. But Hashimoto's moving his day job somewhere new. "Ghostty is where I, our maintainers, and our open source community are most impacted so that is the focus of this change. We'll see where it goes after that," he concluded.
1M monkeys with 1M unplugged Selectrexes (Score:3)
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for some reason, investors continue to poor money into the pit.
Do you think they care about the dramatics?
... Or even the semantics of 'poor' vs 'pour'?
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Joking about crying on my way to the bank has honestly become kind of hollow now that there's nothing worth buying except frustrating and arbitrarily shitty versions of things I used to love. Computers incidentally very high on that scale. Could I go back in time, I would gladly pay for many of these folks to have never done anything with their lives.
Nope (Score:2)
Huh. What's Ghostly?
* Click link -> https://ghostty.org/ [ghostty.org]
* Clcik docs -> https://ghostty.org/docs [ghostty.org]
* Top right corner [ GitHub -> ] -> https://github.com/ghostty-org... [github.com]
Nope.
Re: Nope (Score:3)
Not sure what Ghostly is, but according to the first link there:
Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.
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Nope.
I said that at "Hashicorp".
When Microsoft buys something.... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is very difficult for some people; I understand. I had a hard time letting go of Sun after having been a customer since before they had customers. But it's necessary, because any/all attempts to stay the course are inevitably doomed. It's better to rip the bandaid off as soon as possible, drink a toast to what was, and leave it behind.
Moved to a local Gitea (Score:2)
Plenty of features, easy to install and use, easy on resources, open source, and independent from Microslop.
What more can you ask for?
I used to have all my repos on Github. Now they're all in my Gitea.
Yet another Microsoft purchase success story (Score:1)
GitHub has been terrible for years (Score:5, Insightful)
Git does not need the bloat, it's a simple and powerful tool you run on the command line, with optional server access. You can throw a GUI onto that, to help automate some annoying, but simple, tasks, and there you go. Standing it up into a CI/CD/DevOps/InfoSec dumpster bomb, was never going to lead to a useful product for anyone.
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it's a simple and powerful tool you run on the command line
The Git command line utility itself is also bloated nowadays.
Re:GitHub has been terrible for years (Score:5, Insightful)
The Git command line utility itself is also bloated nowadays.
Perhaps, but one of the nice properties of a command-line app is that the addition of features needn't slow down people who don't need those features.
E.g. git could add 300 more keywords, and as long as the basic "git clone", "git update", "git commit", and "git push" keep working, I won't be effected by that at all.
A GUI-based tool, OTOH, will find its user interface getting increasingly cluttered (and/or cryptic) proportional to the number of features that get shoehorned into it.
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E.g. git could add 300 more keywords, and as long as the basic "git clone", "git update", "git commit", and "git push" keep working, I won't be effected by that at all.
That is a very naive take.
Re: GitHub has been terrible for years (Score:2)
Don't bother maintaining anything, only worry about ticking the next box that might find a new customer.
it's git (Score:4, Interesting)
While I understand his frustration, this is git. Your repo is always local so you can always work with it without relying on a central service. In fact there are ways to run GitHub actions locally. And it can pull and merge from your local command line. I get the convenience of GitHub. But if you're choosing to be dependent on GitHub for everything, then I can't really blame Microsoft for your inability to do work.
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But the whole point of GitHub is collaboration. If GitHub is down, it becomes hard to collaborate on PRs, etc. with people from outside your organization, and maybe even with people within your organization if everyone's checked-out git repo is only accessible from their machine.
(I removed all of my repos from GitHub a while ago and use a self-hosted Forgejo instance, along with mirrors on codeberg.org and salsa.debian.org.)
Self-hosting isn't for everyone (Score:2)
A lot of people can't self-host because they're behind an ISP that blocks incoming TCP connections. It's fine if you already own a domain name, already lease a VPS with big enough RAM to run Linux, a front-end web server, MariaDB, and Forgejo (that is, more than a dinky little 1 GB droplet on DigitalOcean), and already pay for smarthosting of your outbound email to make transactional messages deliverable to would-be contributors who use the big three webmail providers (Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo). Otherwise,
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forgejo on Docker with a Postgres database works perfectly well on Google Cloud e2-micro instance (free tier) and you don't even need to write the docker-compose.yaml file yourself. Yeah yeah, google, but any cloud instance that supports something of that size (about 1 CPU and 0.5GBy of memory on a shared VM server) should be inexpensive enough to work around the whole non-static/firewalled ISP connection.
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Forgejo's requirements are extremely minimal, it'll run on a Pi. A typical $1/month VPS has 1-2Gb of RAM and more than enough storage. So... if you're concerned you can't do this, then bear that in mind.
That said, I didn't read the GP as saying they are hosting a public Forgejo instance. They specifically indicate they're using Codeberg mirror, which is trivially easy to implement with your main Forgejo instance hosted locally instead. So... no VPS, let alone externally accessible IP, needed. they literall
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That is correct. My Forgejo instance has some read-only public repos. But I do not give write-access to the public to the Forgejo instance. For that, they need to use either Codeberg or salsa.debian.org. I can pull and merge from either of those and push to all the mirrors.
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I use GitHub as a simple public-facing repository, that part is pretty solid. I do all the work, including merging and actions, locally. I simply don't use GitHub's pull request mechanism. I did discover that if someone does submit a pull request, I can do the pull and merge locally and when I push back to my GitHub repo, GitHub automatically detects the pull request was pulled and closes it without using any of the web interface.
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I have a cloud VPS that costs me $3.50 per month and is more than capable of running Forgejo. Sure, it would probably collapse under the weight of Gitlab, but Forgejo is extremely lightweight.
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How big is it? Make a shared folder with edit access on Google Drive or OneDrive or something.
I think some of the video conferencing programs allow sharing files.
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It depends on how you use git. My primary working repositories are all local, and not readable or writable by anyone else (nor should they ever be). I push my working branches to GitHub regularly, so others can pull from them. My collaborators on various projects do the same thing. I could push anywhere that's appropriate. A corporate or publicly-accessible Forgejo instance, GitLab, or even just a folder on my web server.
In my naivete I thought this sort of local repo, public repo split is how git was
Instability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Instability (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.digitaltrends.com/... [digitaltrends.com]
Anyone had any doubt? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone had any doubt that this is EXACTLY what would happen once micro$oft got its claws into GitHub?
That is what they have been doing since at least the 90s.
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Embrace, extend, and exterminate*.
*Say that last one with the inflection of a Dalek. And you'll have their A.I. strategy pegged.
No serious programmer every used it (Score:3)
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What's the problem? (Score:2)
With all of GitHub's great new AI features, it writes all your code for you! It doesn't matter whether the site is up at any given moment; just download your newly completed app at some point then the site is online. You're free to kick back, relax and scroll your social feeds because you don't actually have to do anything anymore. This is truly a golden era!
Re: What's the problem? (Score:2)
Yep. And then use excel to make a database of all your apps!
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et je meurs car il ne veut pas apprendre Excel,
comme les marins qui fument cigarettes sur le canal
Mais Excel ne sera pas appris aujourd'hui
mes pensées... sont françaises
This really is no big deal. (Score:2)
GitHub is an upstream Git host with a web interface and some automation stuff for CD/CI attached. All of this can be downloaded and installed in less than 5 minutes with any contemporary FOSS package manager for any OS that people have in use. There's absolutely nothing here you can't replace in less than 60 minutes with some cheap ass 5 Euro/Month virtual host, setup and config included.
Migrate and move along. It's Git, so you've got your backup right in your working copy too.
VPS RAM use and signup email deliverability (Score:2)
There's absolutely nothing here you can't replace in less than 60 minutes with some cheap ass 5 Euro/Month virtual host, setup and config included.
When you self-hosted Git and an issue tracker, how did you take care of these?
1. Last I checked on DigitalOcean's website, a VPS in that price range would have 1 GB of RAM. And last I checked, MariaDB took 300 MB of that by itself. How do you fit Linux + front end web server + MariaDB + Forgejo into 1 GB of RAM?
2. People need to sign up again to report bugs or contribute patches. Signing up is itself a friction, not to mention that your VPS is probably not already trusted by the major email providers. This
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Forgejo can use SQLite, you don't need to use MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL. That said, I'm surprised you believe MariaDB requires 300Mb of RAM. That may be a common configuration, but I've run it in a small fraction of that. I mean, literally, I have a Pi 2 somewhere around that has MariaDB running on it, and that has 256Mb of RAM total.
But... if all you're doing is hosting a local instance for your own projects, no external DB is needed. Here's the relevant docs: https://forgejo.org/docs/lates... [forgejo.org]
Forgejo do
Microsoft 2026 (Score:2)
This is the state of Microsoft 2026. Its more important to slap CoPilot on everything and to create yet more Teams UI changes, than to make anything that actually works. Microsoft's cloud services are garbage, all of them.
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dont forget New Outlook!
Same Old Song and Dance (Score:2)
If your company is dependent on 3rd party software you're at their mercy and not truly independent.
If your company's software relies on someone else to run it you're at their mercy and not truly independent.
You should be able to target multiple platforms and if you're not self-hosting to either be redundant already or be able to quickly move to new digs.
I've helped too many people bail water when they make those decisions incorrectly and wind up in an existential crisis for their company.
You don't need that
Alternatives? (Score:2)
Publicly accessible PR reviews
Build systems (github actions)
Gitlab?
Bitbucket?
same old scheme (Score:2)
embrace, extend, extinguish.