ockham posted at 11:12AM Wed, 29 April 2020 - #4383620

It sounds like the vendors and customers are working together pretty well to maintain stability.

Silicon Valley is locked into the Github Syndrome, requiring revisions of everything every millisecond. That's good for monopoly vendors who can force everyone else to move along, but it's not good for people who want to GET WORK DONE with the product.

Yes and no. Some of the software I've worked with over the past couple of years have comments in there dating back to the 1990s... other software in the catalog (same employer) has the CI/CD model, where everything is stuffed into Docker containers, shoved through a Jenkins/Stash-powered pipeline, and is updated live, any time of day or night, without a CAB or RFC required. Both models can and do work... if you do it right.

You should already know this - feature creep and suddenly-'broken' stuff is a design/UX (read: people) problem, not a delivery method problem. It's not too hard to make constantly-updated software that behaves the same way over long enough periods of time, just that it gets new features and bugfixes at a pace that keeps up with the industry it's in. It can lead to sloppy practices ( 'I don't always bugfix my code, but when I do, I do it in Production...' ), it can make it all too easily manipulated towards stupid/bad ends, and it can lead to a sloppy attitude among those writing the code... but that's not the model's fault. The fault lies squarely with those who run the show.

Now GitHub (since you named it) is more often that not centered around projects that don't have paying customers, SLA-backed expectations, and long-horizon release/use schedules. You know, FOSS and hobby stuff.

Work doesn't have to be paid work; it can be unpaid artistic work. Anyone who is trying to do real work NEEDS a stable set of tools and supplies. If you follow Github you're spending ALL your time on revising your workflow and reorganizing your runtimes and adapting to the new products. You're spending NO time on actual work.

Hazard of the professional life that relies on a moving target, sadly. Unless you band together as a group and set a few ground rules (such as no abrupt changes and always overcommunicate, dammit!), you'll get stomped on.

But then, a question... what is it that drives the upgrade cycle from an artist's POV?