Top all-time · #452
GitHub Engineering
Company blog · githubengineering.comprogrammingsystems
GitHub Engineering is the company blog at githubengineering.com, writing about programming and systems. Since 2015, 122 different Hacker News readers have linked it 189 times, most often “Introducing DGit”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite GitHub Engineering for technical posts on git storage, MySQL high availability, replication, GraphQL and performance work, usually as sources for points about infrastructure.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- One commenter says the blog has really in-depth posts that show metrics; another says a post has an excellent section on why triggers fail.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The Blog of the GitHub Engineering Team
Most-linked posts?
- Introducing DGit6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-04-05
- Discontinue support for weak cryptographic standards6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-02-27
- How Four Native Developers Wrote an Electron App6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-05-16
- Evolution of GitHub's data centers5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-10-12
- Performance Impact of Removing an Out-of-Band Garbage Collector5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-05-18
- A Formal Spec for GitHub Flavored Markdown5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-03-14
- Git Concurrency in GitHub Desktop4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-10-20
- Deploying branches to GitHub.com4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-06-02
- Rearchitecting GitHub Pages4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-05-27
- Topic Suggestions for Millions of Repositories4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-08-01
What Hacker News says?
I think you're referring to the GitHub Engineering blog post [1] about our git storage tier. We [2] store your code on at least 3 servers, which is an improvement in many ways from our previous storage architecture. There are a lot of servers [3] powering things but not the millions it would require to give every customer three dedicated machines. Developing efficient solutions to problems is a requirement (and a fu…
Comment linking /introducing-dgit/
on “Introducing unlimited private repositories”Submitted Move Fast and Fix Things as a story · 538 points
HN discussionI don't know what addresses they use but github engineering blog has a lot of examples of really useful contributions, e.g.: > Shortly after our initial deploy, we also started the process of upstreaming the changes to Git so the whole community could benefit from them. Source: https://githubengineering.com/counting-objects/ But I guess most of their git related work time goes to libgit2.
Comment linking /counting-objects/
on “Microsoft and GitHub team up to take Git virtual file system to macOS, Linux”Submitted Upgrading GitHub from Rails 3.2 to 5.2 as a story · 510 points
HN discussionGitHub may not be the primary contributor to git, but they're certainly a significant user of it, and they _have_ contributed patches to upstream git. (example, the '768 conflict' bug here: https://githubengineering.com/move-fast/ )
Comment linking /move-fast/
on “Microsoft and GitHub team up to take Git virtual file system to macOS, Linux”Submitted GLB: GitHub's open source load balancer as a story · 478 points
HN discussionGoogle Analytics has a query parameter that can be used to extract arbitrary data. So make a request to that with an ID that you control I guess? GitHub mentions it in their CSP post: https://githubengineering.com/githubs-post-csp-journey/
Comment linking /githubs-post-csp-journey/
on “Harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from websites”Submitted Rearchitecting GitHub Pages as a story · 477 points
HN discussionThat just splits up the task of application server & git executor into two, it doesn't get rid of the dependency on a monolithic storage backend. I understand that this is something gitlab.com is working towards and excited about, presumably because it'll allow for provisioning web workers unrelated to the CPU you're spending on running git, but for us I don't see it being useful. I hope GitLab eventually gets somet…
Comment linking /introducing-dgit/
on “Gitea: Open source, self-hosted GitHub alternative”Submitted A Formal Spec for GitHub Flavored Markdown as a story · 475 points
HN discussionDropbox: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to-dro... Github: https://githubengineering.com/evolution-of-our-data-centers/ Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/our-secret-data-center/ Twitter: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... LinkedIn: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/design-buil... FastMail: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html…
Comment linking /evolution-of-our-data-centers/
on “Dropbox S-1”Submitted The GitHub Load Balancer as a story · 438 points
HN discussion> b) increasing the probability of malicious injection Subresource Integrity (SRI) [0] was designed to avoid this potential vulnerability. It's a brand-new browser feature (jus t landed in Chrome stable, is riding the trains to Mozilla stable now) but it's worth taking a look at. Github is already using it [1]. [0]: http://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/ [1]: http://githubengineering.com/subresource-integrity/
Comment linking /subresource-integrity/
on “A Guide to Fast Page Loads”Submitted Kubernetes at GitHub as a story · 413 points
HN discussionThis is the article you speak of: http://githubengineering.com/git-concurrency-in-github-deskt... The AsyncReaderWriterLock mentioned in blog does not directly show up in Google, but it appears to be based on the one in this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pfxteam/archive/2012/02/12/building-...
Comment linking /git-concurrency-in-github-desktop/
on “Move Fast and Fix Things”Submitted February 28th DDoS Incident Report as a story · 369 points
HN discussionI like type (C) whose motto is "move fast and fix things" https://githubengineering.com/move-fast/
Comment linking /move-fast/
on “Facebook’s code quality problem (2015)”Submitted The GitHub GraphQL API as a story · 284 points
HN discussionReading this post-mortem and their MySQL HA post, this incident deserves a talk titled: "MySQL semi-synchronous replication with automatic inter-DC failover to a DR site: how to turn a 47s outage into a 24h outage requiring manual data fixes" https://githubengineering.com/mysql-high-availability-at-git... > In MySQL’s semi-synchronous replication a master does not acknowledge a transaction commit until the change is…
Comment linking /mysql-high-availability-at-github/
on “October 21 post-incident analysis”Submitted Counting Objects as a story · 267 points
HN discussionI believe you're right. They go into their design in their MySQL HA post: https://githubengineering.com/mysql-high-availability-at-git... > In MySQL’s semi-synchronous replication a master does not acknowledge a transaction commit until the change is known to have shipped to one or more replicas. It provides a way to achieve lossless failovers: any change applied on the master is either applied or waiting to be appl…
Comment linking /mysql-high-availability-at-github/
on “October 21 post-incident analysis”Submitted Introducing DGit as a story · 262 points
HN discussionThis can become very problematic. For example: Team is working on feature A and feature B. Each feature is developed on its own branch. Feature A is ready for testing/integration, it is merged into develop. Feature B is ready, it is merged into develop. Now here is the problem: Feature B is ready for release, but feature A is not. It is now not possible to merge develop into master without including both features. T…
Comment linking /deploying-branches-to-github-com/
on “GitFlow considered harmful”Submitted Soft U2F: A software-based U2F authenticator for macOS as a story · 261 points
HN discussionGitHub also migrated persistent data out of Redis and in to MySQL, with their expertise in MySQL as one of the motivating factors. https://githubengineering.com/moving-persistent-data-out-of-...
Comment linking /moving-persistent-data-out-of-redis/
on “'Check Your Backups Work' Day”Submitted Gh-ost: GitHub's online schema migration tool for MySQL as a story · 226 points
HN discussionGitHub: https://githubengineering.com/ Really surprised it wasn't mentioned yet. They do really in depth posts and show metrics too. Example: https://githubengineering.com/how-we-made-diff-pages-3x-fast...
Comment linking /how-we-made-diff-pages-3x-faster/
on “Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?”Submitted MySQL High Availability at GitHub as a story · 225 points
HN discussionCARP and similar systems require an active/passive configuration which we did not want since it needs at least twice as many hosts, half of which are not doing any work. We had similar issues with our former Git storage system based on DRDB ( http://githubengineering.com/introducing-dgit/ ). pfsync, lvs and etc uses multicast to share connection state which we also wanted to avoid.
Comment linking /introducing-dgit/
on “The GitHub Load Balancer”Submitted Moving persistent data out of Redis as a story · 220 points
HN discussion
