Not counting the redesign, there haven't been "sparkly" features. Sparkly features are the kinds of things the old management used to let engineers have free reign to implement.

Github pre-Microsoft was rudderless. They were more prone to implementing silly 3d model diff tools and things instead of supporting enterprise features or building powerful CI/CD tools and automation.

New Github is on the right track.

- Personal Status

- Round Avatars (all catgirl ears are now cut off)

- Collapsing of some similar messages on the Dashboard into one (i missed some things because of this)

- Not just one, but several redesigns (im old)

- The whole "marketplace" functionality (imitation of an app store)

- The "explore" and "trending" functionality (i see this like a Facebook feed)

Not sure about others, but i used GitHub as a git host and issue/MR tracker. All the other stuff is just distraction in my eyes.

> (a bunch of comments about the UX redesign)

I agree. I'll add one: README files with tables now require horizontal scrolling, and that's utterly disappointing.

> The "explore" and "trending" functionality

I do work in ML and computer vision, and this is how I discover all of the new models and code people are using. It's awesome.

> Not sure about others, but i used GitHub as a git host and issue/MR tracker. All the other stuff is just distraction in my eyes.

You're missing out! Deploying code is so easy once you're using CI/CD. Github actions are powerful.

Many of my projects have a fixed scope and thus are 'done' at some point. If you develop like this, CI/CD is rarely worth the effort. Its better suited for projects that suffer from scope creep or regular upstream breakages.

But before that ‘done’ point or maybe for a new project, Github Action is a good feature introduced by Microsoft.

Yeah it's only needed for projects that might change. Anything you can guarantee will never change, is fine.