Description

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, hosts Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond sit down with Marek Šuppa, creator of the Missing GitHub Status page, a project that reconstructs GitHub's historical uptime data and reveals discrepancies between official status reporting and the platform's actual reliability.

 

Marek tells us about his dev journey from open source contributor at DuckDuckGo to machine learning engineer at Cisco-acquired Slido. Then, we discuss GitHub’s evolution from a hosted Git service into a critical developer tool. We cover reliability, transparency, AI-driven platform growth, developer workflows, and the challenges of balancing convenience with resilience.

 

Along the way, we cover alternative platforms, self-hosted solutions, and whether recent outages are changing how developers think about ownership, dependency, and the future of software collaboration.

Topics Discussed in this Episode:

• Why did Mr. Shu create the Missing GitHub Status Page?
• GitHub's reported uptime versus developer experiences
• How open source contributions shaped Marek's career
• The evolution of GitHub from tool to critical infrastructure
• Centralization risks in modern software development
• Git's distributed roots and today's platform-centric workflows
• Developer reactions to GitHub outages
• Transparency and accountability in status reporting
• AI's impact on developer platforms and infrastructure demands
• Microsoft's stewardship of GitHub
• Forgejo, Codeberg, and alternative Git hosting platforms
• Self-hosted Git solutions and tradeoffs
• Network effects and platform lock-in
• The social side of software collaboration
• Building resilience into developer workflows
• What GitHub outages teach us about infrastructure dependency

Links Mentioned:

The Missing GitHub Status Page https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

Slido https://www.slido.com/

https://duckduckgo.com/

The official GitHub Status Page https://www.githubstatus.com/

Statuspage.iohttps://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage

Zig Leaves GitHub https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/

Ghostty Leaves GitHub https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-leaving-github

GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/

Codeberg https://codeberg.org/

https://git.kernel.org/

Forgejo Lightweight Self-Hosting https://forgejo.org/

Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke launches Entire https://entire.io/news/former-github-ceo-thomas-dohmke-raises-60-million-seed-round

Update on Spain and LALIGA blocks of the internet https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of-the-internet