I am spending the evening deleting my Github.com account.

There are plenty of reasons you might want to delete your Github account. I’d love to say that this is a coherently orchestrated boycott on my part, in sympathy with the No Azure for Apartheid movement. Microsoft, owner of Github, is a big pile of cash happy to do business with an apartheid state. That’s a great reason to delete your Github.com account.

I will be honest with you though, the thing that pushed me over the edge was a spam email they sent entitled “GitHub Copilot: What’s in your free plan ”. I was in a petty mood this morning.

Offering free LLM access is a money loser. The long play is this: Microsoft would like to create a generation of computer users hooked on GitHub Copilot. And, I have to hand it to them, they have an excellent track record in monopolising how we interact with our PCs.

Deleting my Github.com account isn’t going to solve any of that. But it feels good to be leaving, anyway. The one billionth Github repository was created recently and it has a single line README containing the word “shit” . I think that summarizes the situation more poetically than I could.

I had 145 repositories in the ssssam/ namespace to delete. The oldest was Iris; forked in 2011.

Quite a story to that one. A fork of a project by legendary GNOME hacker Christian Hergert. In early 2011, I’d finished university, had no desire to work in the software industry, and was hacking on a GTK based music player app from time to time. A rite of passage that every developer has to go through, I suppose. At some point I decided to overcomplicate some aspect of the app and ended up integrating libiris, a library to manage concurrent tasks. Then I started working professionally and abandoned the thing.

Its fun to look at that with 13 years perspective. I since learned, largely thanks to Rust, that I cannot possibly ever write correct concurrent thread-based C code. (All my libiris changes had weird race conditions). I met Christian various times. Christian created libdex which does the same thing, but much better. I revived the music player app as a playlist generation toolkit . We all lived happily ever after.

Except for the Github fork, which is gone.

What else?

This guy was an early attempt at creating a sort of GObject mapping for SPARQL data as exposed by Localsearch (then Tracker). Also created around 2011. Years later, I did a much better implementation in TrackerResource which we still use today.

The Sam of 2011 would be surprised to hear that we organized GUADEC in Manchester only 6 years later. Back in those days we for some reason maintained our own registration system written in Node.js. I spent the first few weeks of 2017 hacking in support for accommodation bookings.

I discovered another 10 year old gem called “Software Integration Ontology.” Nowadays we’d call that an SBOM. Did that term exist 10 years ago? I have spent too much time working on software integration.

Various other artifacts research into software integration and complexity. A vestigal “Software Dependency Visualizer” project. (Which took on a life of its own, and many years later the idea is alive in KDE Codevis ). A fork of Aboriginal Linux, which we unwittingly brought to an end back in 2016. Bits of Baserock, which never went very far but was also led to the beginning of BuildStream .

A fork of xdg-app, which is the original name of Flatpak. A library binding GLib to the MS RPC API on Windows, from the 2nd professional project I ever did. Thhese things are now dust.

I had over 100 repositories on github.com. I sponsored one person, who I can’t sponsor any more as they only accept Github money. (I sponsor plenty of people in other platforms )

Anyway, lots of nice people use Github, you can keep using Github. I will probably have to create the occasional burner account to push PRs where projects haven’t migrated away. Some of my projects are now in Gitlab.com and in GNOME’s Gitlab. Others are gone!

It’s a weird thing but in 2025 I’m actually happy knowing that there’s a little bit less code in the world.