There's a lot of talk about UX (User Experience), and DX (Developer Experience). But those are usually focused around, well, active users. How does the experience for leaving look?

For most corporate software, the corporation "owns" the users' accounts. Handling ex-employees is as simple as... deleting their account.1

This is a bit of a rant about one of the exceptions.

I'm a software engineer. That means that, like it or not2, GitHub ends up being a large part of my life, both personal and professional. And GitHub doesn't really work like that. A GitHub account is largely personal... you keep the same account, but when you join a corporation you join your personal account to an "organization". That lets the company grant access to all (or some) of their repositories (projects) in one go.3 And it lets you set rules like "send notifications related to this organization to my work email".

But what happens when you leave an organization? For most companies, you'd just lose access to those repositories again, and that's the end of it. But.. what if some of those repositories are open source?4 Then you'd still keep the same read access as the rest of the world.5

But what happens to those notifications when you leave? What if the company is focused on open source? What if the company has hundreds of open source repositories?6

A screenshot of some notifications from my old job that ended up in my personal inbox.
Turns out, all of those notifications end up flooding your personal inbox instead, instead.

Oh. Oops.

Now, let's be fair to the megacorporation here.7 You can unsubscribe from these repositories. There's even a handy list of them!8

A screenshot of GitHub's list of watched repositories, highlighting the drop-down menu required to change any setting.
Must be paradise for all you drop-down menu enjoyers out there.

And it's limited to 20 items at a time. And, of course, just paging through it isn't enough. If you unsubscribed from anything you need to reload the page to fill the gap back in, to avoid missing anything.9 Fun.10

But, hey, let's be fair11 to the megacorporation here. There is an "Unwatch all"12 button!13 But I don't want to unwatch everything, there are still a few of their repositories that I do care about. I don't want to just blindly unwatch everything.

I just want better tools to review what I'm subscribed to.

But I don't see that happening any time soon. There's no money in LX, after all.

(PS: And, to be clear, this isn't about Stackable. It's about GitHub, and how their model doesn't actually work very well for open source.)

1

Or just disabling it, so they can't log in.

2

Largely, not. But such is life. I can't always choose where things are hosted, and there are legitimate network effects causing people to end up hosting their stuff there. We live in a society, after all.

3

And enforce some basic security settings. Pretty reasonable stuff, as these things go.

4

Not that this term doesn't feel contentious these days, with how keen the OSI seems on throwing themselves into the woodchipper... alas.

5

It's not like leaving should put you in a less favourable situation than where you started, right?

6

148, at the time of counting.

7

They sure deserve it. They have such important business to attend to, after all...

8

Nevermind that it's hidden in a below-the-fold meatball menu on a page you never visit. That's just the display department.

9

Waiting for over two seconds for every refresh. Buchheit weeps.

10

My kingdom for a horse search engine.

11

And Balanced™©®.

12

(From a single organization.)

13

Another dropdown, in fact!