September 2012 Summaries

GitHub hosts a variety of open-source projects that are valuable for game developers, introducing tools like Torque 3D, Flixel, Three.js, Spring, and Cocos2D. Torque 3D, recently open-sourced by Garage Games, offers a robust world-editing suite for creating 3D games on multiple platforms, while Flixel, developed by Adam Saltsman, is a versatile library for 2D games written in ActionScript. Three.js is a JavaScript library that facilitates 3D rendering in web-based environments using HTML5's canvas, SVG, and WebGL, supported by many tutorials and examples. Spring, a 3D RTS game engine, aims to recreate the experience of Total Annihilation in 3D, while Cocos2D provides frameworks for developing 2D games on various platforms, including iOS and HTML5. Each project is well-documented and suitable for both personal and commercial use, offering extensive customization and learning resources for developers at different levels.

PuppetConf is taking place, and key attendees include @jnewland, @rodjek, and the author. The event features a variety of compelling talks, many of which are available for free streaming, including discussions on Puppet's use at GitHub and The Setup. In conjunction with the conference, a celebratory gathering is being organized by the GitHub team on Friday, September 28th, at 8:30 PM at Zeke's, a favored local venue.

GitHub emphasizes creating exceptional experiences during its interviewing, hiring, and onboarding processes, prioritizing personal interactions over typical formal procedures. The initial contact is often a casual conversation with someone from a similar role, allowing both parties to assess compatibility. For those advancing, GitHub invests in the candidate’s experience, providing travel accommodations and a welcoming interview day filled with relaxed interactions and opportunities to engage in real work. Successful candidates are flown back for a comprehensive onboarding week, paired with a buddy to navigate the company's systems and culture. This approach ensures new hires feel valued and integrated, contributing positively to GitHub’s community and products. GitHub continues to seek talented individuals to join its team, highlighting job opportunities on its website.

GitHub for Windows has implemented a strategy of frequent and automated updates, with 25 releases shipped in just four months, averaging one update every five days. This rapid release cycle minimizes the risk of large-scale changes, democratizes the release process by removing gatekeepers, and reduces the pressure on developers to meet specific deadlines, as updates are frequent. The transition from a manual to an automated shipping process has allowed any team member to deploy updates using simple commands, and this automation extends to tracking and analyzing crashes through internal tools. Updates are automatically downloaded and installed for users, leading to rapid adoption rates and ensuring that bug fixes and features reach users quickly. The GitHub team continues to refine their processes to make updates smaller and more reliable, aiming to enhance user satisfaction and product quality.

GitHub introduced OAuth2 tokens in its API starting with version 3, offering benefits such as revocable access and limited permissions compared to traditional username and password authentication. These tokens can be revoked at any time from a user's settings and are created with specific scopes as determined by user permissions. Historically, deploy keys have been used for deployment scripts and continuous integration services needing access to private repositories, but these have not been compatible with HTTP transport. Now, GitHub extends OAuth benefits to its HTTP transport stack for Git operations, allowing users to substitute their GitHub username with an OAuth token when cloning repositories over HTTPS. While this streamlines operations and reduces friction, users should treat tokens as sensitive as passwords since including them in clone URLs can result in them being stored in plain text within configuration files. To mitigate this, GitHub suggests using full Git URLs for push and pull operations to avoid writing tokens to disk. This enhancement provides more flexibility and security for accessing repositories, as OAuth tokens apply to any repository the user can access, unlike deploy keys.

New user profile pages have been launched, designed to be more personalized and visually appealing, featuring larger, Retina-friendly avatars that encourage users to update low-resolution Gravatars. The layout now separates Repositories and Public Activity into distinct tabs to reduce clutter, allowing for larger Octicons and improved visibility of repository participation graphs. Enhanced searching and filtering tools on the Repositories tab and a prioritized layout for the Public Activity feed, where minor events are minimized, further streamline user interaction. These updates aim to enhance the user experience by making profile pages not only functional but also aesthetically pleasing, according to Jason Long.

Danish Khan and Demonbane are hosting a social gathering in Helsinki at Molly Malone's to coincide with the Frozen Rails event. Scheduled for Saturday, September 22, at 8:00 pm, attendees are invited to join them for drinks. This event provides an opportunity to enjoy the city and engage with others in a casual setting.

GitHub has introduced a new launch page at github.com/launch designed to streamline user access by featuring just the Command Bar, a link to the user's profile, and a notifications indicator. This minimalist interface aims to enhance productivity by automatically focusing on the Command Bar, allowing users to navigate various GitHub functionalities without the need for the full dashboard. The page is optimized for speed and efficiency, making it a practical choice for users to bookmark or set as their browser homepage. The launch page is intended to provide a fast and effective way to engage with GitHub's extensive features.

Kevin R. Barnes invites tech enthusiasts, whether visiting for the Ruby Hoedown or local to Nashville, to join him and fellow tech professionals for a casual meet-up. The event is set for Thursday, September 20th at 7 pm at the Broadway Brewhouse in Midtown, where drinks will be provided by the hosts. Attendees are encouraged to bring themselves and topics for discussion to enjoy an evening of networking and conversation.

A CONTRIBUTING file in the root directory of open-source projects serves as a guideline for contributors on how to format code, test fixes, and submit patches, thereby facilitating effective collaboration between maintainers and contributors. By adding such a file, maintainers can clearly communicate their preferred contribution policies, allowing contributors to easily verify that their submissions align with the project's guidelines. The text encourages maintainers to include a CONTRIBUTING file (or CONTRIBUTING.md for Markdown users) in their repositories, which will then be linked whenever a contributor creates an Issue or opens a Pull Request. If a project lacks this file, contributors are encouraged to initiate a pull request to add one, ensuring that collaboration remains straightforward and organized.

GitHub has introduced a Command Bar feature that enhances the traditional search box with command line-like capabilities, allowing users to interact with github.com in a more efficient manner. By typing help into the Command Bar, users can access various functionalities such as viewing user profiles, navigating to repositories, listing repositories and issues, and searching open issues with specific terms. The Command Bar includes features like tab completion, smart filtering, and command history, accessible via the ↑ arrow key, mimicking terminal behavior. Users can quickly access the Command Bar by pressing s on any GitHub page, and GitHub plans to continue expanding its capabilities, with updates to be announced through blog posts.

OpenBlend is an event scheduled for Wednesday, September 19, at 7:00 PM, taking place at Pri Zelenem Zajcu. The event encourages attendees to enjoy drinks provided by GitHub and engage in discussions about their interests with fellow enthusiasts. Ben Straub, known for spreading joy and cheer during his conference talks, is associated with the event, emphasizing a relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere.

GitHub experienced two significant outages early in the week due to issues with a recent database infrastructure upgrade aimed at improving high availability. The outages, totaling over three hours, were caused by an automated failover process during a database migration that resulted in system overloads and incorrect actions within the cluster management software. The first incident involved excessive load during a schema migration, leading to multiple failovers and temporary disabling of health checks to stabilize the system. The second incident involved a cluster partition that mismanaged master election processes, resulting in data drift and temporary security breaches for some private repositories. In response, GitHub's operations team has shifted to manual failover processes for critical databases, is auditing their cluster management stack, and has enhanced their status site's database capacity to better handle traffic during outages. The team is committed to refining their infrastructure to prevent future disruptions and ensure a stable user experience.

GitHub's Midwest contingent invites participants to join them for a casual gathering at Fiddler’s Hearth, a renowned Irish pub in South Bend, Indiana, on Tuesday, September 18th, at 8:00 PM. This event, hosted by notable GitHub members such as @jonmagic, @jnunemaker, and @orderedlist, offers an opportunity to discuss the significance of software development and version control while enjoying complimentary drinks. Attendees can look forward to engaging conversations in a relaxed setting, celebrating both technological and social camaraderie.

Tim Berglund is attending the JavaZone conference in Oslo, Norway, for the third consecutive year and plans to host a social gathering known as a drinkup at Cafe Con Bar, a venue near the Oslo Spektrum. The event is scheduled for Sunday, September 16th, at 8:00 PM and will provide an opportunity for attendees to enjoy drinks together while discussing topics such as Git, GitHub, and the vibrant technology scene in Norway. The gathering promises to be an enjoyable occasion, and Tim humorously notes that mathematicians are working on proving that a good time is guaranteed.

Phil Haack invites attendees to join a Git and GitHub talk at the Box Jelly, followed by a social gathering at Kanpai Bar and Grill for drinks courtesy of GitHub. The event is scheduled for Thursday, September 13th, starting at 7:00 PM for the talk, with the subsequent meetup at 8:30 PM. It is identified as the first "drinkup" in Hawaii, offering an opportunity for networking and informal discussions among participants.

Will Farrington invites attendees to join him and Rick for a social gathering at Publik Draft House in Atlanta, Georgia, following Farrington's speaking engagement at the Atlanta Ruby Users Group meeting. The event is scheduled for Wednesday, September 12th, around 8:30 PM.

GitHub has modified its notification features, rebranding "Watching" as "Starring" to serve as a bookmarking tool for interesting repositories, while "Watching" now specifically refers to receiving notifications. This change presents a challenge for the GitHub API, prompting a phased rollout of new API endpoints to ensure developers can upgrade their applications smoothly without disrupting existing functionality. New Star endpoints have been introduced, alongside the continued support for existing Watch endpoints, though with updated paths using "subscriber" and "subscriptions" to avoid conflicts. To aid developers in adapting to these changes, GitHub has introduced a Changes blog on the API Developer site, featuring updates on upcoming changes and an Atom feed for subscription, with further updates available through the @GitHubAPI Twitter account.

The latest release of GitHub Enterprise incorporates several new features from GitHub.com and introduces Enterprise-specific enhancements, such as the Subversion Bridge, a new header design, and log forwarding capabilities using rsyslog. This release also includes VirtualBox Guest Additions Installer for VMware environments, new CLI utilities like ghe-vm-reboot and ghe-repo-repair for system management, and an updated Admin Tools UI for improved navigation. Additionally, the Commit Status API and Merging API are now part of GitHub Enterprise, along with features like Notifications & Stars HTML Notification Emails and Sticky Protocol Selection, which remembers users' preference for SSH or HTTP protocols. These updates aim to enhance user experience, streamline system administration, and maintain consistency with GitHub.com while allowing for differentiation between the two platforms.

GitHub prioritizes responsiveness in web application design, with speed being a crucial element, and employs various internal tools to monitor and improve performance metrics. The performance dashboard, powered by data from Graphite, provides an overview of response times across different types of requests but lacks detailed explanations. To address this, GitHub uses the Mission Control Bar in staff mode, providing a detailed breakdown of time periods for rendered pages, which helps identify slowness from the network, browser, or application. This tool displays application metrics such as compressed javascript and CSS sizes, background job queues, and data source times, allowing for in-depth analysis. GitHub also integrates additional tools like New Relic and Graphite to enhance performance investigations, with the overarching goal of delivering an exceptionally fast web application.

An API has been launched to enable third-party services to attach statuses to commits, enhancing the discussion on pull requests by automatically updating commit statuses, such as those used internally in continuous integration setups. This flexible API allows services to define the success or failure of a commit, thus enabling diverse applications like design reviews or verifying contributor license agreements. Pull requests display the status of the latest commit, with optional metadata, and provide a warning if the status is not 'success', although merging is still possible. Currently, services like Travis CI and Sprint.ly integrate with this API, offering automatic status updates for enabled repositories. The API supports states like "pending", "success", "failure", and "error", and while statuses are immutable, multiple statuses can be attached to a commit, with only the most recent displayed. The community is encouraged to explore and develop further integrations using this new API.

Curt Micol, along with Bryan Veloso, is inviting fellow enthusiasts to join them for an evening of drinks and engaging conversation at Tortoise & Hare, with GitHub covering the expenses. The event is scheduled for Tuesday, September 4th, at 9 PM, and aims to bring together individuals with a shared interest in the subject matter.

Brooklyn is set to host its own drinkup, inviting attendees to join for an evening of drinks and engaging conversation courtesy of GitHub. Taking place on Wednesday, September 5th at 8pm, the event will be held at a venue called Beloved. Attendees are encouraged to travel via the G train or take a short walk from the Bedford L to reach the location. The gathering is organized by @luckiestmonkey, @steveward, and Julia West (@juliamae), promising an enjoyable night for those who participate.