This is going to be some sort of a public service announcement, with side notes. This has been brewing for a long, long time (years), it’s just that I never seemed to have the focus time required to solve this once and for all. But now I decided to get moving, and it is already ongoing. If you are among those few with an interest in code I publish, do read on.
What?
I am moving all of my public source code repositories off of GitHub. My ambition is to completely end my own usage of GitHub, in short order. Henceforth, I will not rely on GitHub in any way for my own projects, and I will only use GitHub to occasionally interact with and contribute to other peoples’ code hosted on GitHub. So yes, I am keeping my account but I will eventually remove all my code. That, unfortunately, means I won’t be able to leave the repositories in an archived or read-only state – I will have to wipe (physically destroy) the object database by force-pushing a new “initial commit” that removes all history. Why? Because I simply can’t afford to leave GitHub in possession of any of my code.
I am doing this swiftly but gradually, one repo at a time, and I expect that most repositories are of no real interest to anyone except myself. (Maybe not even me, as lots of my old repos are de facto unmaintained/abandoned. But they still contain code I’ve written, so they must be migrated as per the above.)
Why now?
As stated above, this has been on my TODO list for a long time, and there is no special occasion. I just had the opportunity to spend some quality hours during the winter break and develop my own alternative that will serve me going forward. I also had time to research deeper into the controversial issues (chiefly, but not exclusively, concerning Copilot) surrounding GitHub. That was enough of a nudge to convince myself that migrating off of GitHub is long overdue. (I had that itch ever since the Microsoft acquisition was announced. Others have beat me to it.)
Why me?
I count myself as an incredibly privileged software developer, having had a lot of success in the past two decades both professionally and with several of my open-source projects. Were I unable, or unwilling, to stand up to this challenge, then I could not meaningfully expect anyone else to do it either.
But change needs to happen. And as the great N. N. Taleb says: “If you see fraud and don’t say fraud, you are a fraud.” I am speaking with my actions.
What will change?
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