GitHub is a pretty decent cloud based Git repository. I would put it in my top 2 along with GitLab.

However, I have a love/hate relationship with the notifications. In so far as I hate them. I find the emails are unreliable, sometimes they come through quite quickly and on other occasions they seem to take an age and I’m pretty sure I’ve not received some at all.

I’ve tried the web notifications and as far as I can tell they are pretty useless unless you have a client that will read them and notify you. The notification UI on the site is OK but I’m not interested in having the webpage open and checking it manually. Perhaps there are some simple ways of working with them that I’ve not come across…However, I have tried using GitHub notifier clients such as Gitify for the desktop and this Chrome extension but I still don’t feel I am getting what I want from the notifications. No fault of the clients, they seem to work OK.

If the clients tell me when things happen, what else is it that I want? I think my problem is I have been spoilt in the past as I have used the GitHub integration with Slack to pump notifications into a dedicated GitHub channel. This has provided me with the insight into what I think it missing - the record of events. It appears to me that the aforementioned notifiers do little more than read the central GitHub list of notifications and mark them as read. And when a notification is read it goes, poof, never to be seen again. Well, not until the all notifications page is viewed. So whilst the functionality exists, as already mentioned I don’t want to have the page open, manually checking on it - it just feels a little unloved.

The good news is using Slack as my GitHub notification hub is a really great experience, it truly works quite brilliantly. The only slight downer is that I tend to belong to Slack communities that are on the free tier and the GitHub integration is less useful than other integrations. So what to do - the solution is really quite simple. I have my own Slack domain and I use one of the limited integrations for GitHub. Now I can configure which repos I get notified about, what level of detail I have, all to my heart’s content. And I don’t need to worry about bombarding others with GitHub notification overkill as there is only one in my own community! With Slack powering how I get notified I have all of the configurability Slack is known for across the many Slack clients there are.