I am in the same position as the author: I have a tenure track in academia, a semi-decent work, and good feedback from peers/students. However, I never felt so miserable.
I've been thinking about all the reasons why I should not quit. The "freedom" in Academia, helping society (or a few people in it), the grass being greener on the other side, the pandemic is exacerbating my thoughts, it's just burnout, and so on.
I grow more convinced by the minute, particularly when I read that other share the same agonies (thanks for sharing this, author!).
Industry is though in many aspects, but at least it's not a delusional bubble fueled by frustration as Academia is. If nothing else, Industry feels more real and with better chances of making me feel alive.
I quit academia after my PhD. Now, working as a developer remotely I have no money stress, relaxed work schedule, relaxed colleagues, no need to write grant applications etc. I even have some time to study the same academic stuff I was doing before, but without the pressure. The only thing missing is the academic network for exchanging ideas.
When I tell this to my friends still in academia, I can sense some envy, but also get this feeling that they are not comfortable with even entertaining the idea of getting out of academia.
I second that. It has a limited feature set, which makes you focus on what matters. It is not like Jira that buries you in tons of options and information.
Yeah, unfortunately this is the truth (and also the definition of vendor lock-in, right? :)
IMHO GitHub Actions is the flip switch here. Eventually it will become so useful and powerful that its advantages will overshadow any migration's cost related to tools like Jira.
So I just started in a Senior Product role at one of those two alternatives that you prefer Github to. Any chance you'd be willing to share some specifics that you prefer from GitHub?
Sure! Here is a list of the most important ones (not in any particular order):
- The pull request and code review UI are more user friendly. Everything I need is within reach and clearly visible (build status, test runs, change suggestions, discussions, etc). Gitlab has most of it, but Bitbucket is far behind on this.
- I spend a lot of my "open-source" time on GitHub, so the whole workflow/UI feels super natural to me.
- Issues can track tasks, Discussions can track talking. This is great to keep things organized.
- Great (and simple) release page (recently they added automatic changelog generation from merged PR, which makes it even better).
- GitHub Actions. This is a game changer. It is a well crafted, well documented way of implementing new things in the project workflow. Being able to use a "random" action someone put up that does what I need is priceless. It's like using open-source libs to enhance my code pipeline (allows reusability, discovery, etc). This is also great for CI/CD.
- GitHub projects beta has built-in support for sprints, as well as custom fields (integrated with issues, which is awesome). Everything seems to orbit around the code (imagine coding some custom GitHub action, whose code lives in the same repo as my project, which reacts to the content of a particular issue).
- Issues (and discussions) use markdown and can embed images, videos, spreadsheet, etc, very easily.
This is amazing insight - thank you so much for taking the time, I really mean it.
Let's see if I can stretch the friendship ;)
Would you say that it's fair to say that there's a common theme running under a few of this items which is that Github see's the Repo as the "core entity", and has everything else hanging off that (Project management, conversations, pipelines, etc).
Whereas something - lets say the Atlassian suite for example, more see's "projects" as that "core entity", and then has things like your code, pipelines, conversations, etc hanging off it?
Also a question on Github projects (and this may just be my ignorance), but are the projects in Github tightly coupled to certain repo's? I never liked Gitlabs project tooling because the "Project" was too tightly coupled to a repo, making it kinda jank when you were working on a project that touched multiple repo's.
If you're gitlab, then ignore his criticisms, github is trash. If you're working on bitbucket, then you have my condolences.
Oh except one thing - when I'm reviewing commits, I want to see tags if there are any. I would also like to quickly be able to tag a release while seeing the last version number.
It would make it less annoying to gather all the changes since my last tag for release notes.
You raise a really interesting point re: Tags. I know Bitbucket does have some commit tag grouping functionality. Have you seen a system for that process in Github or Gitlab that you prefer?
I want to second that. Andreas YouTube channel is a great source of genuine inspiration. It's enlightening to see a person as skilled as Andrea doing such great craftsmanship regarding scoping things, improvising, making mistakes, fixing them, making compromises to achieve goals, and more.
Precisely this! 1MB is perfect for a small "hosting" company putting other small companies online, e.g. John's bakery. A git deploy functionality would drastically improve automation to manage websites. I know the provided cli can do it, but it's a other thing to integrate.
This is such a cool project that deserves some attention.
As a side note: one of the project members was interviewed on The Changelog[0]. The interview presents many topics related to the project, e.g. technology, community, challenges.
Thanks. I was was actually about to post this. Fábio Rehm gives a really good overview of the project in that podcast. This is how I actually discovered that project.
Please help me! I'm trying but I've gotten next to 0 feedback so far. If you have two laptops will you test it and let me know what your experience was?
As someone that worked in the industry and is now in the academia, I think rewardingness is relative. I see academia as much (or as little) rewarding as the industry. For me, the rewarding part of academia is related to teaching, i.e. see my students develop and evolve as professionals and citizens. Some of my colleagues think the reward is related to conducting research.
I think reward boils down to the things you actually pursue and do, both in the academia or the industry.
I would say you did an impressive first step towards your goal of filling up a coding gap. This is spot on regarding utility! Congrats on shipping and implementing such a useful tool :)
