January 2015 Summaries

Young and aspiring coders can now celebrate as the GitHub Shop has introduced new baby one-pieces and kids' tees, thanks to a recently merged pull request. This addition to the shop was announced by Brandi Firestine, highlighting an expansion of GitHub merchandise aimed at encouraging and inspiring the next generation of programmers.

The GitHub Charity Dodgeball tournament is making a return with an event scheduled at the SoMa Recreation Center in San Francisco on Sunday, March 22, from 1:00 pm to 6:30 pm, followed by an after-party at GitHub HQ. The event is designed to raise funds for four local charities: BUILD, SF Public Library, Second Harvest Food Bank, and Glide, with a buy-in of $3,000 per team. Teams will compete under World Dodgeball Society rules, requiring 10 players on the court and allowing up to 15 members per team for substitutions, with a maximum gender ratio of 3:1. The tournament, which previously raised $58,000, aims to surpass its past success, with donations managed by Bright Funds, benefiting educational and community support initiatives across the region.

GitHub's Security Bug Bounty program, launched a year ago, has successfully led to the identification and resolution of 73 previously unknown security vulnerabilities in their applications, thanks to global researchers. Out of 1,920 submissions, 869 were significant enough to warrant further review, addressing vulnerabilities across nine OWASP top 10 classifications. Notably, 33 researchers collectively earned $50,100 for reporting 57 medium to high-risk vulnerabilities, with standout contributions from researchers like @adob and @joernchen, who discovered complex exploits involving cross-site scripting and remote command execution. As the program enters its second year, GitHub is increasing the maximum bounty payout from $5,000 to $10,000, encouraging further participation and inviting submissions of newfound vulnerabilities while providing ongoing updates via their @GitHubSecurity account.

The Patchwork hack night, scheduled for February 4, 2015, at iXperience in Cape Town, is a hands-on workshop designed for beginners to learn Git and GitHub, requiring no prior coding experience. Participants will have the opportunity to create their own open-source project, achieve a merged Pull Request, and gain confidence to engage more in the open-source community. The event will feature GitHub staff and local community mentors offering guidance and support, beginning with an introductory talk from a GitHubber about their programming journey, followed by small group work on the Hello World tutorial, and concluding with a lightning talk from a community member about their open-source experiences. The workshop aims to foster a collaborative learning environment with food and refreshments provided, and encourages both newcomers and experienced mentors to RSVP to participate.

GitHub, in collaboration with the eScience Institute at the University of Washington, is organizing a Town Hall event focusing on the intersection of academia and open source software. The event aims to address the challenges faced by academic researchers in gaining recognition for software development and maintenance as credible research activities. It will feature discussions on how academic institutions can evolve to better support software tools and their creators, and what lessons can be drawn from the open source community. Scheduled for February 2nd at the University of Washington in Seattle, the event will also be available via live stream for those unable to attend in person. Panelists include experts from various institutions, such as the University of Washington, UC Berkeley, the National Science Foundation, and Amazon Web Services.

Git Merge, a unique user conference dedicated to Git, will be held at La Gaîté lyrique in Paris on April 8-9th to celebrate Git's 10th anniversary. The event will feature sessions focusing on using, scaling, and developing on Git, presented by core Git maintainers. Attendees can look forward to ticket availability and session details soon, and they can stay informed by following GitHub on Twitter or signing up for updates via email at git-merge.com.

GitHub has introduced guidelines to enhance communication and collaboration during pull request reviews, aiming to maintain a positive company culture as it grows. The guidelines emphasize clarity in writing pull requests by stating their purpose, providing context, and indicating desired feedback and timelines. Contributors are encouraged to involve specific individuals or teams in discussions by @mentioning them and to maintain a constructive tone when offering feedback. The feedback process should focus on understanding the context, providing thoughtful suggestions, and avoiding negative language. Responders should appreciate feedback, seek clarification when needed, and ensure all comments are addressed. When discussions become complex, transitioning to a direct conversation may be more effective, followed by a written summary for transparency. These practices draw inspiration from Thoughtbot's code review guide and are tailored to fit GitHub's work culture, promoting professional development and product quality.

GitHub Enterprise's latest release introduces several new features aimed at enhancing user and team management, expanding deployment options, and improving monitoring capabilities. Notably, the integration with LDAP has been deepened, allowing for automated user account management and access provisioning directly from LDAP, while also boosting performance. The platform is now compatible with OpenStack KVM, in addition to AWS and VMware, broadening its deployment flexibility. An expanded audit log now provides a comprehensive record of user actions across the entire instance, and a new Instance Monitoring Dashboard offers insights into performance metrics like data disk usage and CPU activity. Additional updates include organization webhooks, enhanced UI for pull requests, SVG file capabilities, and more, with a free trial available for potential new users.

GitHub offers a system for managing third-party applications that integrate with its platform, ensuring that organization administrators can control which apps access their data by maintaining a whitelist of trusted applications. This setup requires explicit approval for any application seeking access, thereby allowing administrators to authorize only trusted services, such as continuous integration tools, while blocking others. Organization members can request app approvals from admins, who will then evaluate the application's suitability for accessing organizational resources. Additional guidance for setting up approved application lists and recommendations for developers integrating their apps with GitHub are available in the documentation and the Developer Blog.

Pull requests are a valuable tool for reviewing and discussing code, documentation, and designs, and GitHub for Mac has enhanced this process by allowing users to create pull requests directly from the application. This update simplifies interactions with forked repositories by automatically fetching the upstream repository, enabling users to check out or merge its branches without needing to use the command line or handle multiple remotes. Josh Abernathy highlights these improvements as a way to streamline workflows and encourage users to download GitHub for Mac to take advantage of these features.

GitHub introduces a new web-based commit composer feature that allows users to quickly propose changes to a new branch and open a pull request directly from their browser, facilitating faster and more accessible collaboration. This enhancement reduces the time needed to initiate a pull request, thereby lowering the barrier for contributions and making the collaboration process more approachable for users with varying technical skills. For those interested in understanding how GitHub Flow operates and assessing its suitability for their projects, a guide by Coby Chapple is available for further exploration.

GitHub for Windows now offers a feature that allows users to select specific lines or blocks of changes to include in a commit, enhancing the ability to make small, focused commits that are easier to review and discuss in complex codebases. This functionality mirrors the interactive staging capability available through the command line with git add -i or git add -p, enabling users to manage their changes more effectively by committing only the desired modifications and leaving others for further development. This update is particularly useful for maintaining clarity and organization when handling a mixed set of changes within a working directory.

GitHub's Documentation Team transitioned from a complex Rails-based setup to a streamlined Jekyll 2.0 static site on GitHub Pages to enhance their documentation workflow. This move allowed them to simplify the deployment process, improve site speed, and enable features like versioned content and reusable text snippets, known as conrefs. By leveraging Jekyll's core capabilities and minimizing custom plugins, they maintained their preferred Markdown writing style and integrated a faster, client-side search with lunr-js. This transition not only aligned with GitHub's existing workflows, such as using pull requests for editorial reviews, but also made their documentation process more efficient and accessible, benefiting both the team and GitHub users who utilize GitHub Pages for their projects.