Yesterday, Nat Friedman, GitHub’s CEO announced a new feature, which allows developers to share their status to coworkers know about their availability. This feature gives open source maintainers and other developers an option to inform their community that they are away and won’t respond to issues as quickly.
Shipping today — set a status on your GitHub profile to let your friends and colleagues know what you’re up to, and set expectations about your availability. pic.twitter.com/XiZU3TO0dp
— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) January 9, 2019
GitHub started this year with a bang by announcing updates like unlimited free private repositories (GitHub Free) and a unified enterprise offering (GitHub Enterprise). Previously, it also added a Star button using which you can indicate the topics you are interested in so GitHub can fetch the code and developers that share your interests.
You can find this feature on your GitHub profile and choose from options like On vacation, Working from home, Out sick, and Focusing. You can also set it to Busy and GitHub will inform your coworkers if they assign you any task.
Many users reacted positively to this feature update and also suggested further improvements. These are some of the suggestions:
Hi Nat, I lead the deployment of GitHub Enterprise at IBM in the early days.
It would be nice if this status could be read / written from a canonical source (maybe LDAP) for synchronization across apps, e.g. also @SlackHQ.
Thanks for the great comms! 🙇
— Bill Higgins (@BillHiggins) January 10, 2019
It would be wonderful to have a similar feature per-repo. To set similar expectations.
— Eric Amodio (@eamodio) January 9, 2019
Nice! Is GitHub Stories coming next? 😉
— Julian (@jlnostr) January 9, 2019
Though many developers were excited about this feature, some of them also mentioned their concern:
Does Microsoft want to turn GitHub into a social media platform for programmers? A mix of facebook and linkedin for tech?
— Timo in Wien (@timoinwien) January 9, 2019
It’s nice you are adding features but please do not turn it into a social network. We have twitter for that.
— Simran Preet Singh (@simran5590) January 9, 2019
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