And there's no reason to suspect this next batch of migrations will be any different. Telling your engineers, 'good luck, you get to spend the next 18 months treading water,' is a terrible way to get them to give their best or even stick around.
That said, the difficulty of the work was absolutely also a factor in deciding not to carry through with earlier migrations, so your point still stands as a whole IMO. Just, now solutions will be found for blockers and engineers will be kept on it, rather than efforts stalling out and being put on hold.
I find it interesting to compare timelines like this (which is very reasonable and expected for an organization of Github's size) with, for example, how AI 2027 describes the world will look like in October 2027.
In the next 24 months, if all these timeslines are to be believed, AI will have cured cancer, agent-5 will be plotting to kill all humans, leveraging all the data in a Global Central Memory Bank to subvert the internal corporate politics of all companies, governments, and militaries toward this goal (These are all real predictions AI 2027 makes); and Github will still be migrating workloads to Azure.
Maybe they should get agent-4 to help them.
I think there will probably be a long tail which will prevent that from happening so quickly.
(It also probably doesn't really matter... if their main goal is to scale using azure they really only need the stuff that will be scaling up to be there. They probably also want to be seen as eating their own dog food, which can reasonably be achieved without all of the long tail.)
With Github's service record, that means there should be no observable difference between them doing the migration and them operating as usual.
But having gone through a data center migration; depending on how "unique" some of their existing setup was; I do not envy them in this process (and I estimate this will take double the expected time :P).
yes, the addition of un-disableable "AI" features made me spend a large amount of time and effort moving every single one of my projects off GitHub
mgdev•1h ago
tyleo•1h ago
This seems inevitable since the acquisition and not necessarily a bad thing. I see it as neutral.
tacker2000•1h ago
But since “new features” consists primarily of shoving the bloody copilot agent down everyones throat, it might not be such a bad thing.
dmix•1h ago
I've tested the beta one and like most SPAs it doesn't scale well to large amounts of data (large numbers of files / line counts). You can feel the DOM slowing down even on a high end macbook. It even blanked out the page a couple times, another common issue when browsers are overloaded. So I switched back to the old one.
dmart•53m ago
torgoguys•45m ago
Good! Shoring up infrastructure vs. delivering the latest hotness is something that is rarely prioritized. I'll take boring and reliable every day of the week.
dbbk•31m ago
walkabout•1h ago
stackskipton•50m ago
aaronbrethorst•1h ago
rufo•44m ago
Before that, it still felt like there _some_ degree of autonomy and ability to think about the developer experience on the platform as a whole. Once ChatGPT took off and MSFT decided that they were going to go hard on AI, though, Copilot (and therefore GitHub) became too important to Microsoft to leave alone.
I kinda suspect the slide was inevitable anyway, given how acquisitions tend to go. But IMO, Copilot was the tsunami that washed the octocat out to sea.
driverdan•24m ago