Project - Moving to GitHub
The project is finally moving (back) to GitHub. Why do we do this? What are the alternatives, and what will happen in the future? This is just a brief experience report about our moving to GitHub.
The project is finally moving (back) to GitHub. Why do we do this? What are the alternatives, and what will happen in the future? This is just a brief experience report about our moving to GitHub.
Why do we move?
After one year of self-hosting, you may ask: "Why do you even want to change?" and "Isn't self-hosting everything better?" Unfortunately, the answer is not an easy one. But let me explain.
We had some fun with self-hosting, and it was very pleasant to really own the service. We also considered moving to GitLab (self-hosted). Having in mind, that we wanted to move in the Kubernetes direction, this seemed absolutely reasonable. On the other hand, we want to host a couple of services, that are needed either from us or from the users of the while-true-do.io stack. It seemed like a good idea to eat what we cook.
BUT, this also means that we need to keep up with updates, configuration, user creation, security considerations and scaling the whole thing. Furthermore, integrating self-hosted solutions in cloud services is often harder, than using a well-supported cloud services. Since we are working on this little project in our free time, we needed to decide how much time (and money) we want to spend on our own infrastructure.
There is one more topic, that was important to us: discoverability. Last year, we were basically hiding in some dark corner of the internet. If one wanted to open an issue, he needed to register with us for the sake of a single bug report. And this was only possible, if he even found us.
GitHub is the best known platform for hosting Open Source code, even after it was bought by Microsoft. You can find thousands of projects there, and basically every developer on the planet has a GitHub account. This should make it easier to get in touch with us and raise issues.
Where to find us?
On GitHub, of course. :-p We are currently changing all the links, so you can find us easier. For now, here we are:
- Site: https://while-true-do.io
- Mail: hello@while-true-do.io
- Code: https://github.com/whiletruedoio
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/whiletruedoio
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/u/whiletruedoio
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_FcV7FNXImhZ7VZ1uug7tQ
You see, it got a bit easier already. Some of these channels will see more content over time, and we will also add proper subdomains to while-true-do.io.
How to interact and follow?
Interacting with us got even easier. On GitHub, you can open issues and fork repositories to open pull-requests. We will also try to keep the majority of our work there. If it does not exist on GitHub, it will not be ready.
Following us and keep on track with new releases or blog articles is also very easy. We will announce every article and update via Twitter and plan to update other channels accordingly. For everybody who prefers RSS, we offer this already for the blog and GitHub does provide it out of the box.
We are looking for comments, feedback and ideas how to improve.
What's next?
The next steps are very interesting for us. We will integrate services that help us develop faster, use CI/CD cloud services to automatically build, test and publish our code and also announce new releases and deployments via Twitter and other feeds.
If you are interested how this will look like, you can follow one of the initial repositories like our container-template. It facilitates a CI service (Cirrus-CI) to do the heavy lifting.
And then? Development for sure. The new plans, ideas and organizational topics are already covered in some new repositories.
To summarize this in very short: We plan to develop a reproducible infrastructure, that can be used on your home server, your data center or in the cloud. On top, we will develop our own services and provide some services, we are interested in. If you want to run Minecraft in a container or if you need a simple application dashboard for your browser, we will cover these and much more.
Docs & Links
This time most links are already spread in the article, but for your convenience I want to add some important documents.
whiletruedoiowhiletruedoiowhiletruedoioConclusion
Moving back to GitHub was a hard decision, but it was needed to put our focus more on development and problem-solving. We will have more time to work on real problems and will not be busy with updates and issue solving.
What do you think about this move?
