“Mysterious breakage was so common and catastrophic that we’d codified an option for our bootstrap script: –nuke-from-orbit.”
A new hire needed half a day to get GitHub running locally, and a new branch could mean a 45-minute bootstrap. GitHub fixed that by moving its developers onto the cloud dev product it sells. The case study is also the sales pitch. The real problem was a 14-year-old monolith, and now it runs on Microsoft’s servers instead of a MacBook.