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404s were designed for performance, as OP says here, but also to be as simple as possible.

Part of the difficulty was info leakage; early on there was a lot of concern that a 403 would imply the existence of a repo that the org might otherwise not want known publicly. This was a little trickier in practice, really: early versions of the page took slightly different pathways as it went through auth, so based on the duration of the page to render you could make some assumptions about whether the underlying repo existed or not. It was annoying to sort out, so it wasn't touched very often.

Certainly a lot could have been done with 404s over the years; they've only gotten worse. I put ultrathin font weights on the error pages move than a decade ago, when they were en vogue, and it kills me every time to see them still there. And, of course, the parallax effect has been removed, so now it's just sort of a dorky Star Wars or Looney Tunes reference without a lot behind it. Weird.


A 220k 404 page is certainly not for performance. It's politics.

Hah, no, that wasn't a thing at the company back then. 220k is large; not sure what snapshot of the page they were looking at at the time, but in any case "performance" in this context means server-side perf.

(fwiw, GitHub switched to Rails 3 sometime around 2011-2012 or so).


Amusing to read this and think back on GitHub's seed round ($100M). At the time we just had a small business account from Bank of America... going from relatively thin cushion in the account over the previous few years to suddenly dropping in $100M was pretty amusing. I believe we moved to a more sophisticated setup quickly thereafter.


I have like 7500 stars on my dotfiles over the last 15 years or so; it's definitely weird. It's kind of a different open source project entirely; the goal isn't really to make good software... it's to make good software for me. Most of the time in open source those overlap completely, but with dotfiles I'll get pulls that make sense, that can be helpful, but... at the end of the day they're my dotfiles and I don't really make large changes to them anymore. It's just a lot different from my other projects I manage.

That said, mine also started before things like Oh My Zsh popped up, which are better frameworks to share and collaborate on these things. I think frameworks like that are great, and I think seeing someone's more "intimate" dotfiles is helpful, too- you get a look at how someone sets up their environment, which tends to be private unless you're doing a lot of pair programming. So yeah, just interesting all around.


Things were going quickly on the run-up to Rails moving over, but even so, Rails was pretty aggressive at jumping on GitHub when they did, and it was one of our first real "major" open source projects on the site, in hindsight. There was a huge difference pre-Rails and post-Rails.


I'm a huge Newsroom sucker, but that one just felt weird. The whole "we used [clip] sarin" felt really drawn-out and kind of weird. On the other hand, my partner and I constantly say "we used sarin" to each other so maybe it has a way of sticking in your brain regardless. (And it might mean our relationship is... odd.)


> FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected.

I'm more of a casual when it comes to Final Cut Pro rather than a daily driver, but it does seem like the last year or two they've started to get back into the fight again. Some of the 360 VR/AI/multi-iOS camera changes seem to go more hand-in-hand with "Apple gives a shit about content creation again", buttressed by Apple Vision Pro and spatial photography.

As someone who's still eagerly awaiting like... any reasonable prosumer device to shoot for Apple Vision Pro, I think all of this industry is going to really ramp up in the next few short years very quickly. Gonna be interesting.


Yea, if Apple is going to want their VR products to succeed they're going to have to rely heavily on some vertical integration on video capture/editing software, and FCPX (and now Pixelmator for the spatial photography efforts) seems like the natural place to put those efforts.


It feels a bit strange though that they made FCP for iPhone/iPad a subscription, and completely separate one from the Mac App.

Like, Apple probably doesn’t even need to make money from any of FCP? IMO should be used for driving people to buy more hardware. It’s a little bit offensive for them to charge $5/month on top of a $300 Mac app.

On my Mac I have Davinci, and was considering perhaps trying FCP, but not at those prices / subscriptions.


Fair enough. I don’t use the iPad version of FCP or Resolve, but I’ve paid for both Mac apps and have enjoyed free updates from Apple and Blackmagic for close to 10 years.


I built the last major update to GitHub Issues over a decade ago now, and I was... kind of hoping for more. Feels more like it's checkbox-driven development instead of sitting down and really planning long-term about what improvements could be made. Also it has React.


Zach your conference presentations back when you were at github were amazing to me, and were such a huge reason I applied for a job at github. I've been there for 7 years now and I just wanted to thank you for being you.


Made me super happy to read that!


When this comes on in the Big House you immediately feel like you want to run through a brick wall for the team.


Yes. It’s probably one of the most-watched games in NWSL this season. People who don’t even watch NWSL watched this game.

I mean, hell, even if it were just another game I’d probably find it relevant to include that Alex subbed off in the 14th, because that’s really eye-raising. This is a total miss by AI that would have never gotten past a real editor.


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