GitHub

GitHub saved my bacon a couple of years ago when the University decided to close down personal web pages. At a colleague’s suggestion, I moved everything to GitHub, and there it has stayed since.

At that time I just dumped everything there. Now I have decided that I should put a bit of order into the chaos. In the process, I have discovered that GitHub is one of the worst pieces of software I have ever had to use. I just note some “features”:

1. There is no manual, and no online help. This is compounded by the cryptic names given to the commands, of which “Commit” for “Save” is one of the mildest. So later on, when I say “X is not possible”, you should read it as “I can’t find out how to do X, see Point 1”.
2. You can move a file down, into a subfolder (bizarrely, this is done by editing the file, even if it is a binary file which can’t be edited); but you can’t move it up or sideways.
3. You can upload something, but you can’t download. There is a glitch here too: you can upload a folder by dragging it into a window, but not by selecting it.
4. If you make a mistake, as I did (I accidentally deleted my entire talks directory) you can, by clicking everything clickable until something you want happens, get back to the situation before you deleted it; but you can’t tell GitHub to reset this as the current version. I had a very stressful couple of hours trying to figure out how to do that, and didn’t succeed.
5. And on top of this, there is the very annoying three minute wait after every change. It doesn’t tell you when it has finished doing what it does. And sometimes this is crucial, and not waiting is disastrous; sometimes it gives you a stern warning “Run Cancelled” but in fact everything is fine; and sometimes it seems not to be necessary to wait at all.

Later I remembered that GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and all became clear.

My web pages exist because I have a possibly exaggerated belief that some people find them useful. But if they ever start charging for GitHub, I will probably decide that I am not going to pay to use that rubbish, and pull the plug on it.