Today was an interesting day, to say the least.
GitHub was down. For hours, too.
And although someone might be tempted to dismiss it as one of those things that just happens, the chaos it caused was anything but small.
You see, for better or worse, GitHub is where the action happens.
It isn't just the place where most developers collaborate. It has become the hub, hence the name, that connects so many of the applications and services we rely on in production.
I realize it is probably the OCD part of my brain that made me feel so uneasy, but not being able to access our code, deploy changes, review pull requests, or simply check on things made me feel like I had misplaced my driver's license three hours into a road trip.
You know you will probably be fine.
You know the problem will eventually sort itself out.
But you still can't stop thinking about it.
So I had to remind myself that GitHub would eventually come back, and that there were other things I could work on in the meantime.
Can't say I enjoyed the challenge, no sir.
As a matter of fact, I started wondering if I had everything backed up properly.
Had I deleted a local repository at some point, thinking it was safely sitting in the cloud?
Had I made the classic idiot move of assuming that because something exists somewhere else, it must therefore be safe?
A little PTSD of sorts started creeping in as I remembered all the work I lost back in my musician and recording years because of hardware failures.
There is something about losing access to your work that makes you question every backup decision you've ever made.
And with all of this said, I couldn't help but wonder if there is a decentralized solution to GitHub out there.
Has someone already started working on such a thing?
I remembered Utopian, back in the legacy days of Hive, and how it was supposed to evolve into something along those lines. But for reasons I honestly don't remember, that never really happened. Eventually, Utopian went away.
And that got me thinking.
The sad conclusion I arrived at is that, for someone who loves decentralization and spends so much time preaching about freedom, I'm actually incredibly dependent on centralized applications and the monopolies behind them.
GitHub goes down, and suddenly I feel like I'm missing a limb.
Cloudflare has problems, and half the internet starts sweating.
AWS has an outage, and entire businesses start wondering what the hell they are going to do.
We have built a world where the infrastructure underneath our supposedly decentralized digital lives is often anything but decentralized.
And I'm just as guilty as everyone else.
Maybe even more so, considering how much I talk about this stuff.
So perhaps the lesson from today isn't that GitHub needs to become decentralized.
Maybe the lesson is that I need to take a harder look at what I actually depend on.
Because it is very easy to talk about decentralization when everything is working.
It is when the centralized service disappears for three hours that you find out just how decentralized you really are.
Ironic?
MenO
