Matthew Lang

It’s been quite a week for GitHub and not in a good way.

It’s no secret that GitHub outages have been more frequent recently. The Missing GitHub Status Page definitely paints a more accurate picture of the outages that GitHub have been experiencing.

This week, Kev Quirk shared his reasons for migrating his public repositories away from GitHub to Codeberg. While he acknowledged the significant downtime, Kev’s main reason for leaving GitHub is to reduce reliance on big tech.

Recently, Mitchell Hashimoto, author of Ghostty, also indicated that the Ghostty project will be moving away from GitHub. Mitchell cited the increasing outages of GitHub as being the main driver behind the project moving elsewhere.

My move away from GitHub stemmed from a sense of division between work and personal life. I use GitHub for work and for personal projects. Despite using separate laptops for work and personal, I actually have the same GitHub account for both. So while I changed my laptop, the GitHub account was still the same. GitHub was convenient, and that convenience blurred the line between work and personal. Eventually, I found myself tuning out more on my personal projects as I felt I was still in my work environment in GitHub. It was time to consider another place for my personal projects.

GitHub’s centralisation made it hard to consider leaving. Everything is already there. All the popular open source projects, lots of social features and thousands of developers that you can follow. I imagine it’s the Facebook for developers (even though I don’t have a Facebook account).

I started looking for an alternative platform to host my projects on and eventually settled on Sourcehut.

Yes, it lacks several features that are perhaps taken for granted in other platforms like GitLab and GitHub, but it was this minimalism that attracted me to the platform. It just had the essentials that I needed. Git hosting for my projects and the ability to track tickets for those projects. I can still manage my personal projects with ease, perhaps even easier now that I do everything through the terminal.

As for the social side of GitHub, I don’t feel I have missed out on anything by moving to SourceHut. I’m still keeping up to date with new open source projects and libraries through the different RSS feeds and newsletters I subscribe to. As for people, I subscribe to their blogs. If it’s important, they’ll write about it.

GitHub’s recent outages have sparked several conversations on websites like Hacker News and Lobsters. It would be easy to identify outages as the main reason people are moving away from GitHub, but clearly, it’s rarely the whole story.

Mitchell Hashimoto writes about the decision to move the Ghostty project away from GitHub.

I’ve felt this way for a long time, but 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. 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. This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.

I don’t think this will be the last open source project to leave GitHub in the coming months. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing either. It’s good to have competition, and there are a number of great Git platforms elsewhere on the internet for developers.

Maybe GitHub has had its day in the sun with developers. I’ve no doubt it will remain the largest platform for developers and their projects. But given the outage history over the last few months, I’m curious to see if other projects follow suit.

I’ve tried a lot of different systems for note-taking and task management over the years, but one downside of each has been the time needed to maintain its organisation to a level that keeps it useful. I have lost track of how many different systems and methods I have tried, but I always ended up with a small collection of notes until I settled on the Bear notes app a few years ago. Even using the Bear notes app, though, I was still not 100% settled on using it and wanted something more from my notes. And that’s where the LLM wiki pattern came in.

The LLM wiki pattern, described here as a GitHub Gist, has been an absolute game-changer since I started using it last week. The gist on GitHub explains the system and how the LLM can help maintain your wiki over time.

The migration

It hasn’t taken me long to migrate my Bear notes and Instapaper queue to Obsidian, and, coupled with the ability to automate parts of the schema and for the LLM to handle management of concepts, entities, and summaries, I have managed to get my current notes in Bear to a better shape than I have ever had them in before. Migrating my Bear notes and Instapaper queue to this new system was quite expensive in terms of LLM usage, but I managed to spread it out over a few days.

What I am left with after this initial migration is a list of 150+ articles from my Instapaper queue that I need to vet and decide whether to keep in my notes. I’ll be doing these in batches of five or six each morning to avoid burning through my Claude Pro subscription. I found out early on that this process of fetching and summarising articles can be quite expensive in terms of token usage.

The benefits

My notes are now plain text Markdown files once again. Many note-taking apps use Markdown, but not many of them allow you to access your notes as files and update them outside of the app. Having plain-text files means I am not tied exclusively to Obsidian, and I can use other tools with them if I want to. They might not always be in the right format or syntax for linking between notes, but they are in a fairly common format that is easy to update and migrate.

I am also choosing not to sync these notes to my phone. The intended outcome is that anything I need to do with my notes should be done on my laptop during a dedicated time slot for that task. This should also reduce the amount of time I spend on the phone, which is never a bad thing.

I am migrating my tasks from Things to a separate section of the wiki, still within the same vault in Obsidian. The structure of these files is based on Nicholas Bate’s six compass points, and is a mixture of projects, notes and next actions. The six compass points allow me to allocate a project or task to a specific compass point and make organising such items much easier. The big benefit of this system is that, while I can allocate tasks across different compass points, I can bring all of them together into a single view in Obsidian using the Dataview plug-in.

So far, so good

The LLM wiki pattern is great because it does most of the work for you. It maintains the index, summaries, fetches and breaks down sources for you. I’m quite happy to review additions as they come into the system, but the self-organisation of the information is what makes this a quite powerful tool.

There are other benefits to this, but the big one for me is that the information across my wiki is back to plain text again. I’m happy to have a collection of files I can maintain myself if needed.

I admit it’s early days with the LLM wiki pattern, but the gains from it over the first week have been impressive. In a few months, I’ll touch back on its usage, what I have changed with it, and whether I will continue using it.

I finally caught up on the NFL Draft this week. I’ve been trying to catch up with the selections early in the morning, but with a busy Friday and Saturday, I missed most of the news from these nights. The downside of living on this side of the pond, I guess.

I’ve been an NFL fan for years, but the draft always seems to be more of a thing that can only be determined on the night. I’ve been reading a few articles a week leading up to the draft, but other than maybe the first round, I can’t see how anyone can foresee who is going where until the start of each round. Still, it’s fun to read the predictions.

Being a Packers fan, I am in no position to criticise the picks Brian Gutekunst has made; he’s a general manager for a reason. Saying that, though, I am happy with the draft picks for the Packers. We have addressed the areas of the Packers squad that needed the most attention. I’m really glad to see we took two cornerbacks. Time will tell if these picks pay off.

The trade-up for the sixth-round pick of Florida kicker, Trey Smack, is the most interesting. A highly rated kicker at the college level, and hopefully a pick that can turn into a very reliable kicker in the long term. I believe Mason Crosby was also a sixth-round pick, so Trey is already in good company.

Hopefully, the Packers can pick up a couple of undrafted free agents as well and develop these guys over the next season or two into good additions to the squad.

I don’t want to wish the summer’s good weather away, but I am looking forward to the NFL season starting up again.