August 2011 Summaries

Cameron McEfee humorously highlights the quirky products available in the GitHub shop, such as octocat-themed items for babies and coasters to prevent drink sweat. The text playfully suggests that these products are solutions to everyday problems, encouraging readers to explore more offerings in the GitHub shop.

Scott Chacon's blog post, praised by PJ Hyett, provides an insightful look into how GitHub employs its own platform in the development process, emphasizing the versatility of Pull Requests. Beyond being a tool for code review, Pull Requests are highlighted as a powerful means of collaboration during the feature development phase. The post encourages readers to explore Chacon's insights, suggesting that understanding the broader applications of Pull Requests can significantly enhance collaborative efforts in software development.

Rocky Mountain Ruby participants are invited to a drinkup hosted at the Catacombs in Boulder, Colorado, on Thursday, September 1st, at 8:30 pm. This social event offers attendees the opportunity to enjoy complimentary drinks and is organized by Timothy Clem. The venue, located at 2115 Thirteenth St., Boulder, CO 80302, provides a casual setting for networking and relaxation after the conference activities.

GitHub is participating in the Ruby Hoedown event in Nashville, Tennessee, where Matt Todd will host a gathering at the Red Door Saloon at 8 PM. Attendees are invited to join for a drink, with the opportunity to meet and interact with Matt Todd, who has expressed a desire to connect and socialize over a beer. The event is located at 1816 Division Street, Nashville, TN 37203, and is tagged under events.

Corey Donohoe and @rodjek are organizing a drinkup in Wellington during Kiwi Pycon, inviting attendees to discuss their projects with fellow enthusiasts at Mac's Brewbar on the waterfront. The event, scheduled for Friday at 19:00, welcomes individuals interested in Python as well as those passionate about other programming languages. Participants can identify the group by looking for people with octocat stickers, and the gathering will continue until the allocated funds for drinks are exhausted.

GitHub announced the winners of the PyCodeConf giveaway, who are Casey West, Christopher Grebs, Andrew Gwozdziewycz, William Dodson, and Nolan Brubaker. These winners receive tickets to attend PyCodeConf in Miami, Florida, on October 6th and 7th, which promises an exciting lineup of speakers discussing the current state and future of Python. The conference is designed to be an intimate, single-track event with various social opportunities to engage directly with speakers in a relaxed setting, taking place at the Epic Hotel in downtown Miami, with a special room rate of $179 per night. While tickets are selling quickly, GitHub had reserved five tickets for this giveaway, and participants could enter by forking a gist and answering questions by a specified deadline.

GitHub is hosting a social event in Zurich, inviting attendees to join a drinkup at Paddy Reilly’s at 8 pm, where they will have the opportunity to meet the GitHub team and enjoy a complimentary beer. The venue is located at Talstrasse 82, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland. This event is promoted with the tag "events" and was written by Scott Chacon.

Alastair, a Ruby developer from Trondheim, Norway, has won a ticket to Frozen Rails. He is notable for his contributions to Rails and his personal open-source projects, wee_beastie and Integrity Basecamp Notifier. For more information on his work and projects, you can visit his site, Simply Excited. The announcement was made by Kami Richey, known on social media as @kamzilla.

GitHub is offering an online Git training course on August 16th, led by Matthew McCullough, to help participants quickly gain proficiency in Git from the comfort of their home or office. The course consists of six 50-minute sessions covering essential Git commands and costs $195 for a single student or $435 for three students, running from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm EST. Previous attendees have praised the course for its clarity, practical examples, and engaging instruction, with testimonials highlighting the improved understanding and appreciation of Git's capabilities, particularly the rebase feature, and commending McCullough's teaching style and course structure.

Ace is a JavaScript-based code editor used by platforms like Cloud9 IDE and GitHub for file editing, offering users features such as indentation with TAB and Shift+TAB, and line commenting with keyboard shortcuts. It supports editing across different browsers, including Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, and provides options to customize tab or space usage and indentation levels. For files in Markdown, Textile, or other rich text formats, GitHub presents a rendered preview instead of a diff. Users can enhance language support by adding new modes via Ace's wiki page, and there is an open invitation to contribute to the editor's development by improving Ace on GitHub. Feedback and suggestions are welcomed, emphasizing the collaborative spirit of the platform.

The SF Drinkup event has been relocated to Mister Lew’s Win Win Bar & Grand Sazerac Emporium, offering attendees a vibrant setting for engaging conversations and drinks in one of San Francisco's more lively districts. The gathering is scheduled for Thursday, August 11th at 8 PM at 441 Jones Street, promising participants an evening of memorable experiences and stories to share the following day, despite the short notice of the venue change.

GitHub Issues for iPhone was introduced as a mobile app to enhance the convenience of managing issues on the go, though it is no longer supported as of January 2017. The app was designed to let users create and comment on issues, track issues across all repositories through a comprehensive dashboard, and utilize filters to focus on relevant issues, especially in repositories with a high volume. It also allowed users to save favorite repositories for easy access and view them in a "Recently Viewed" section. The app aimed to mirror the improvements of Issues 2.0 by offering a user-friendly interface for checking updates from anywhere, whether starting the day in bed or commuting to work.

A conference pass is being given away for the Frozen Rails event, which will take place in Helsinki, Finland, on September 20-21. Participants can enter the contest by forking a gist and answering specific questions, with the contest running until Sunday, August 14th. The winner will be announced the following week, as shared by Kami Richey.

Nodeload, a GitHub node.js project responsible for preparing git repository contents into zip and tarballs, recently celebrated its first anniversary but faced various technical challenges due to increased demand. To address the issues of high request volume and server load, the project was restructured; the Nodeload server now functions as a simple proxy app, directing requests to file servers that run an archiver app with an HTTP frontend over git archive. This new setup utilizes in-memory tmpfs partitions for cached repositories to reduce disk IO and shifts load to underutilized backup file servers. Despite improvements, initial launch issues such as high IO and memory leaks were encountered, traced back to improper closure of reader streams upon client download abortion, which prevented server space reclamation. The solution involved monitoring the 'close' event on HTTP server requests. The revised Nodeload system is now more stable, simpler, and better tested, with ongoing efforts focused on establishing improved metrics to enhance service reliability.