I used GitHub issues as a form of project management to plan my wedding many years ago.
My wife was skeptical at first, but the ability to add labels, search, etc made it really easy to work together and accomplish the tasked we needed in time for the wedding.
The hardest part was creating a bookmark that links directly to the issue tracker.
Oh, I’ve also used GitHub issues to organize all the boxes in my most recent move. I would create an issue and the description would list all the contents of a box. Then I would write the issue number on the box. After moving, I could search GitHub to find that one thing I was looking for and know what box it was in.
Because you can’t search that without physically looking at each box. There could be a bunch odd reasons that many boxes remain unpacked; downsizing, temporary housing. It’d be nice to be able to finds the one thing you need (you could even label the issue with the box location!).
Anyway, a fun solution but I think it’s more effort than I would have been willing to put in even if I would have appreciated the outcome.
I've used LibraryThing for book boxes. Using smallish boxes (30-40 paperbacks each) so that carrying them is not a backbreaker. Scan the ISBN barcodes with phone app, fix old ones/whatever on web app, tag with box number written on at least two sides. No problems found so far.
This is a fun anecdote to share, but everywhere you can find people with absurd workflows that are better dealt with using proper tools. FWIW I used Org mode to organize a move to another country. I really cannot stand the idea of feeding my personal information to Microsoft.
Sounds to me like parent used a proper tool. It just happens to be very flexible. In general, the best tool is the one that you use and makes sense to you.
At my last job we almost used Gitlab for all our project management. The only thing that stopped us was not being able to use references between projects. It's very project focused, which is of course good enough for open source projects.
But at my current job Gitlab could easily take over Youtrack, already took over Upsource.
I expected the first comment to be about privacy. I don’t keep a lot of notes but I definitely consider them even more private than even email. Not sure I want them training LLMs. Or are there actually assurances from MS around privacy for private repos?
The amount of extremely sensitive corporate secrets in GitHub issues makes me assume that their security and privacy are pretty rock solid.
A lot of companies pay GitHub a lot of money to look after their source code and related artifacts. That's GitHub's business model. I don't think they would jeopardize that trust for the sake of training a model on private data.
Where I work we don’t use GitHub, but we do use Copilot. It took a long time before it was opened up for us to be able to use it, as deals had to be struck and accounts and auth setup to use our corporate logins, which have different rules for data privacy than public use of Copilot. We are explicitly forbidden from using the public version of Copilot, or any other AI for that matter.
I can only assume that companies paying for GitHub also pay for enhanced levels of privacy. Just because a company can pay GitHub not to train on their data, doesn’t mean they’re not going to train on your data that is being hosted for free. They are almost certainly crawling all free repos.
Assumptions are not sufficient when it comes to basic human rights. And my assumption is that they do or will use your data from their own interest as the likelihood that someone within Microsoft will benefit tends to 1 as time tends to infinity.
privacy needs to be verifiable (Apple has show this is possible with private cloud compute)
I dunno. For one thing, those companies are paying GitHub a lot of money for the enterprise version, separately hosted (right?). The data isn't actually available to Microsoft employees or LLMs, absent some security flaw or backdoor. For another, companies that pay for this also (sample size is small, though) have automation that scans GitHub repos, issues, etc for any secrets and require them to be removed and scrubbed from history, implying that they don't trust even the self-hosted GitHub Enterprise as much as you do.
I remember awhile back that they were and do train on repositories to the point that I never wanted to use GitHub for anything other than submitting bug reports to projects.
Maybe the non-training only applies if you pay protection money? But then you run into the whole if it's public there's nothing stopping some other AI that isn't MS from accessing the repository and training on it.
It's such a wasted opportunity too. It would be so powerful to understand how a tool is used by searching for popular repositories that are already using it.
> And somehow I always come back to a bunch of markdown files inside a Git repo.
Others have mentioned this but if you want to keep this workflow, the best app I've found is Obsidian + Git Plugin. It works fantastically well on desktop though it does require a little work to get it working on iOS.
Are there options to see the current state of the repo? What I mean is, for example, I like that in VS Code I instantly know the current state because the git sidebar icon shows a notification of uncommitted changes. If I don't have a visual reminder, I'm more likely to not make commits when I should, and I also don't want an auto-committer firing after each change. I find the visual reminder keeps me anchored to my git status.
Heck, maybe I should just use code for notes. One plus would be web access with code server, since Obsidians only docker image that I know of uses VNC.
Anyone compared these two tools and have a decent write up? The biggest item which comes to mind would be referencing other notes and the features built on top of that?
Compared to something with automatic bidirectional sync between all devices, something where one has to manually commit/push/pull a new/edited note feels archaic.
OTOH you get version history, with commit messages if you care to write them. And the full power of git to explore the history. You can edit the same file on two (offline) devices, then resolve the inevitable merge conflict.
"Automatic bidirectional sync between all devices" scares me. How does it deal with merge conflicts? How am I sure I'll be able to revert to a previous version? Can I see the full history of a file? I don't know, perhaps it'd be ok. I certainly wouldn't learn git just for note taking! But, I know how to use my hammer, so everything look like a nail...
I thought it would be a problem as well but it turns out I absolutely never edit my notes on two machines at once. The commit/push/pull is done via a simple bash script that I'm running as a build command inside VS Code.
I oscillate between Apple Notes and a bunch of markdown files, which is a pretty painful thing to do.
I like how future proof a folder of markdown files is. But I like the design, simplicity, and deep features for capture and media support offered in Apple Notes.
The more a markdown app supports extra stuff, the more proprietary it starts to feel, as any app to read it will also need to support those things.
A while back I told myself I was going to stick to Apple Notes, as going back and forth to other things is painful, and doing it proactively means more pain, rather than maybe having some pain in 10 years of the app goes away. However, where I am again, in the middle of a largely manual migration back to Obsidian for my folder of markdown files. I used an export, but the formatting is so bad that I need to clean up every single note.
The inability to export, as well as the lack of anything more than the bare basic formatting options (at least at the time a few years ago) pushed me off apple notes.
Totally agree. GitHub issues is probably the best bug tracker/ticketing system you can imagine. Intuitive interface, simple, clean, and fast. Just waiting for a Microsoft redesign to completely fuck it up. :P
I've used plenty of proprietary issue tracking systems and GitHub is missing several features that I now consider quite important though certainly not essential:
* The ability to write an issue summary separate from comments. When you are debugging some hairy bug, some manager doesn't really want to wade through all the comments to get an idea; an editable summary at the very top of the page communicates high-level points to stakeholders while others continue to comment on details. People work around this by editing the initial comment of the issue but it's better if there's something more dedicated.
* Sophisticated access control. More than once when someone writes a bug report they are referring to a bug experienced by a single user. For user privacy reasons there needs to be a per-issue permission system to restrict access beyond the permission implied by the repo.
* The ability to add personal notes to an issue without publishing it. Whether it's a draft form of a comment or something else, it gets rid of the need to maintain your own notes.
Every experienced dev knows what happens when they are subjected to issue trackers with loads of features: some managers require all those features to be used (cause that's what they paid for!). So instead of spending your time debugging you have to ensure the bug is properly tagged, categorized, has the right version number(s) for affected software, has the right assignee, yadda, yadda. Then some busy beaver will send you email reminding you that you haven't filled in all the drop-downs and check boxes correctly....
It wouldn’t be too hard to add that with a 3rd party plugin. You could set an event hook to run through the comments, and add it to the top comment.
For bonus points, you could use an LLM to summarise. Every company loves a bit of AI these days, so your manager can gloat with his manager buddies that you now have AI-powered issue tracking.
2. That sounds like an anti-pattern to me. There shouldn’t be PII in your dev issue tracking system.
There problem here isn’t RBAC, it’s the workflow. If you’re in a situation where you need to make notes of sensitive information then you should store that in the same data store as the source information (eg Salesforce, et al). And I say this as someone who hates Salesforce.
3. I’ve not seen this feature in any issue tracker. Sounds like a nice feature but I wouldn’t have thought it as essential.
Isn't the entire purpose of Azure DevOps to be a sort of Jovian gravity well into which Microsoft marketing principles can be sucked into before they hit GitHub?
Hard for it to stay that way when Microsoft's own teams start dogfooding it. Evidence points to even the Windows Team using GitHub Issues as their primary PM tool today.
The saving grace for now seems to be that Microsoft sees the "Advanced" PM tools in GitHub as value adds and is either rolling them out slowly to charge "Preview Customers" for as long as possible for that for that feature before making it public and/or putting them into GitHub pricing tiers such as "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it" and "Offer you cannot afford to refuse".
Readit News
My wife was skeptical at first, but the ability to add labels, search, etc made it really easy to work together and accomplish the tasked we needed in time for the wedding.
The hardest part was creating a bookmark that links directly to the issue tracker.
Oh, I’ve also used GitHub issues to organize all the boxes in my most recent move. I would create an issue and the description would list all the contents of a box. Then I would write the issue number on the box. After moving, I could search GitHub to find that one thing I was looking for and know what box it was in.
Anyway, a fun solution but I think it’s more effort than I would have been willing to put in even if I would have appreciated the outcome.
I've used LibraryThing for book boxes. Using smallish boxes (30-40 paperbacks each) so that carrying them is not a backbreaker. Scan the ISBN barcodes with phone app, fix old ones/whatever on web app, tag with box number written on at least two sides. No problems found so far.
This is a fun anecdote to share, but everywhere you can find people with absurd workflows that are better dealt with using proper tools. FWIW I used Org mode to organize a move to another country. I really cannot stand the idea of feeding my personal information to Microsoft.
But at my current job Gitlab could easily take over Youtrack, already took over Upsource.
Dead Comment
I got 9,413 issues and 39,087 comments, for a grand total of 48,500 combined!
A lot of companies pay GitHub a lot of money to look after their source code and related artifacts. That's GitHub's business model. I don't think they would jeopardize that trust for the sake of training a model on private data.
I can only assume that companies paying for GitHub also pay for enhanced levels of privacy. Just because a company can pay GitHub not to train on their data, doesn’t mean they’re not going to train on your data that is being hosted for free. They are almost certainly crawling all free repos.
privacy needs to be verifiable (Apple has show this is possible with private cloud compute)
Maybe the non-training only applies if you pay protection money? But then you run into the whole if it's public there's nothing stopping some other AI that isn't MS from accessing the repository and training on it.
Related discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36184948
How is it excellent when current logs could do with a bit of redesign doesn't find the comment (requires quotes to find it)
And then a tiny typo "current logs could" do with a bit of redesing also fails you
Others have mentioned this but if you want to keep this workflow, the best app I've found is Obsidian + Git Plugin. It works fantastically well on desktop though it does require a little work to get it working on iOS.
Heck, maybe I should just use code for notes. One plus would be web access with code server, since Obsidians only docker image that I know of uses VNC.
Anyone compared these two tools and have a decent write up? The biggest item which comes to mind would be referencing other notes and the features built on top of that?
If I want to keep this workflow why shouldn't I just continue using this same workflow?
"Automatic bidirectional sync between all devices" scares me. How does it deal with merge conflicts? How am I sure I'll be able to revert to a previous version? Can I see the full history of a file? I don't know, perhaps it'd be ok. I certainly wouldn't learn git just for note taking! But, I know how to use my hammer, so everything look like a nail...
I also store in a onedrive folder for automatic sync and backup in case I have a crash before I do a git commit.
https://github.com/cybersemics/em/
"em is a beautiful, minimalistic note-taking app for personal sensemaking."
I'm not trying this app.
The readme is more about the technical details of the code than the actual features of the app. Where do I go to see what this thing can actually do?
Do people expect me to run the program just to see if I want to run the program?
I like how future proof a folder of markdown files is. But I like the design, simplicity, and deep features for capture and media support offered in Apple Notes.
The more a markdown app supports extra stuff, the more proprietary it starts to feel, as any app to read it will also need to support those things.
A while back I told myself I was going to stick to Apple Notes, as going back and forth to other things is painful, and doing it proactively means more pain, rather than maybe having some pain in 10 years of the app goes away. However, where I am again, in the middle of a largely manual migration back to Obsidian for my folder of markdown files. I used an export, but the formatting is so bad that I need to clean up every single note.
Dead Comment
Or neovim with FzfLua (on laptop)
This makes every app that saves into iCloud files behave like Notes, i.e. work offline with automatic online sync.
* The ability to write an issue summary separate from comments. When you are debugging some hairy bug, some manager doesn't really want to wade through all the comments to get an idea; an editable summary at the very top of the page communicates high-level points to stakeholders while others continue to comment on details. People work around this by editing the initial comment of the issue but it's better if there's something more dedicated.
* Sophisticated access control. More than once when someone writes a bug report they are referring to a bug experienced by a single user. For user privacy reasons there needs to be a per-issue permission system to restrict access beyond the permission implied by the repo.
* The ability to add personal notes to an issue without publishing it. Whether it's a draft form of a comment or something else, it gets rid of the need to maintain your own notes.
It wouldn’t be too hard to add that with a 3rd party plugin. You could set an event hook to run through the comments, and add it to the top comment.
For bonus points, you could use an LLM to summarise. Every company loves a bit of AI these days, so your manager can gloat with his manager buddies that you now have AI-powered issue tracking.
2. That sounds like an anti-pattern to me. There shouldn’t be PII in your dev issue tracking system.
There problem here isn’t RBAC, it’s the workflow. If you’re in a situation where you need to make notes of sensitive information then you should store that in the same data store as the source information (eg Salesforce, et al). And I say this as someone who hates Salesforce.
3. I’ve not seen this feature in any issue tracker. Sounds like a nice feature but I wouldn’t have thought it as essential.
I would hope this will soon be written by AI automatically; summing up high-level points in an issue discussion seems like a perfect task for an LLM.
The saving grace for now seems to be that Microsoft sees the "Advanced" PM tools in GitHub as value adds and is either rolling them out slowly to charge "Preview Customers" for as long as possible for that for that feature before making it public and/or putting them into GitHub pricing tiers such as "If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it" and "Offer you cannot afford to refuse".
I don't want to risk my notes on a configuration error or billing mishap.
For example, stuff like this could happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23832437