The Missing GitHub Status Page with Marek Šuppa

In this episode of Elixir Wizards, hosts Charles Suggs and Emma Whamond sit down with Marek Šuppa, creator of the Missing GitHub Status page, a project that reconstructs GitHub's historical uptime data and reveals discrepancies between official status reporting and the platform's actual reliability.

Marek tells us about his dev journey from open source contributor at DuckDuckGo to machine learning engineer at Cisco-acquired Slido. Then, we discuss GitHub’s evolution from a hosted Git service into a critical developer tool. We cover reliability, transparency, AI-driven platform growth, developer workflows, and the challenges of balancing convenience with resilience.

Along the way, we cover alternative platforms, self-hosted solutions, and whether recent outages are changing how developers think about ownership, dependency, and the future of software collaboration.

Topics Discussed in this Episode:

Why did Mr. Shu create the Missing GitHub Status Page?

GitHub's reported uptime versus developer experiences

How open source contributions shaped Marek's career

The evolution of GitHub from tool to critical infrastructure

Centralization risks in modern software development

Git's distributed roots and today's platform-centric workflows

Developer reactions to GitHub outages

Transparency and accountability in status reporting