June 2015 Summaries

GitHub has implemented a standardized set of scripts known as "Scripts to Rule Them All" to streamline the process of setting up and contributing to software projects, aiming to minimize friction and promote efficient collaboration. These scripts, which include commands like script/bootstrap for dependency management and script/test for running tests, provide a consistent bootstrapping experience across projects by normalizing script names and responsibilities, making them composable, easy to understand, and language agnostic. This approach allows contributors to perform essential tasks without needing extensive knowledge of the project's underlying structure, thereby enabling faster and more reliable contributions. GitHub has also established a repository, github/scripts-to-rule-them-all, to showcase examples of these scripts and provide further details on their usage.

The GitHub File Finder, a tool that allows users to quickly locate files within a repository, is now accessible on mobile devices. Users can utilize this feature by clicking the “Jump to file” link on any repository page, enhancing the convenience and efficiency of navigating GitHub on mobile platforms. This update was announced by Aman Gupta, also known as @tmm1.

GitHub has released version 1.0 of the Atom text editor, which can be downloaded from atom.io, and a detailed behind-the-scenes story is available on the Atom blog. The Atom team is participating in CodeConf, where they will present a session about Atom 1.0 featuring Chris Wanstrath, Ben Ogle, and Daniel Hengeveld. The session can be viewed via live stream on June 26th at 11 AM EDT.

GitHub has introduced four new themed Octicon button packs available for purchase in the GitHub Shop, allowing enthusiasts to collect a variety of designs such as graphs, pencils, and locks.

Hackcon III, taking place at the San Francisco office on July 18th and 19th, is an event organized by Major League Hacking designed for student hackathon organizers. It will gather 150 student leaders for two days of talks and workshops, focused on sharing experiences and best practices related to starting campus groups and organizing large-scale campus events. The event is specifically targeted at those who lead student hacker communities at universities, and interested participants can find more information and pre-register at hackcon.io. Additionally, videos from the first two Hackcon events are available on YouTube.

GitHub has announced its expansion in Europe, with teams in the UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands supporting this growth. As part of its engagement in France, GitHub is organizing a meetup in collaboration with the system integrator Open Wide at their Paris headquarters on July 7th, 2015. This event will highlight GitHub's influence in the region, featuring presentations from local customers, including M6Web, a prominent media company that has utilized GitHub for over two years. The meetup, conducted in French, aims to showcase successful use cases and strengthen the open-source community in France.

CodeConf is set to take place in Nashville next week, with excitement building around the opportunity for the open source community to come together for idea exchange and networking. A free meet and greet event, open to the public, is scheduled for June 24 at Acme Feed & Seed for early registration, offering a chance for locals not attending the conference to join in. The workshop schedule has been updated, with additional space opened in sessions for those interested in participating, and there are still tickets available for the main event. Attendees are encouraged to check the website for detailed information on sessions, workshops, and sponsors, as the community gears up for a dynamic and engaging gathering.

An upcoming Patchwork hack night will take place on Tuesday, June 23, 2015, at Deavor Co-Working in Nashville, co-hosted by GitHub members and local community mentors. This casual, hands-on workshop is designed for beginners to learn Git and GitHub without requiring prior coding experience. Participants will engage in self-directed learning with the support of mentors, aiming to complete a Hello World tutorial, create their first open source project, and achieve a merged pull request, thereby gaining confidence to further engage with the open source community. Mentors are encouraged to guide newcomers, and the event promises a mix of hacking, socializing, and refreshments, with accommodations made for food allergies and wheelchair accessibility.

GitHub recently opened its first international office in Japan and is now focusing on Europe, which accounts for 36% of its site traffic, making it the largest demographic of GitHub users globally. With 32 million monthly visitors, 74% of GitHub's traffic originates outside the United States, with Germany, the United Kingdom, and France being the most active European countries. However, on a per capita basis, Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands lead. London, Paris, and Stockholm are the top European cities for GitHub activity. European organizations such as SAP, XS4ALL, and the UK Government Digital Services are at the forefront of using software to drive innovation and improve citizen services. About 10% of GitHub's workforce is based in Europe, with recent hires focusing on supporting European customers. GitHub representatives are attending events like London Tech Week and EnterConf in Belfast, with more meetups planned to engage with the European tech community.

GitHub employs an internal exception tracking tool called Haystack to manage system and application-level issues, which range from Git timeouts to JavaScript errors. Developed over six years, Haystack helps monitor user-facing properties and desktop applications by detecting anomalies using simple rules like z-score calculations, setting exception thresholds, and providing real-time alerts via Hubot, which notifies engineers of potential issues following a deployment. This process involves analyzing exception rollups to identify trends, responsible parties, and affected areas. Haystack's integration with GitHub's systems and its Areas of Responsibility (AOR) framework assists in pinpointing the source and severity of issues. Despite its effectiveness, the deep integration and evolution of Haystack make it unsuitable for open-sourcing, although GitHub encourages others to adopt similar monitoring practices.

GitHub now allows users to create deploy keys with read-only access, enhancing security by restricting write access unless specifically permitted. Deploy keys, which are SSH keys stored on a server to grant access to a single GitHub repository, are commonly used for cloning repositories during deployments or continuous integration processes. Previously, deploy keys automatically included both read and write access, which could be undesirable in certain scenarios. With the new update, deploy keys created on GitHub.com will default to read-only, although users can opt to grant write access by selecting the "Allow write access" option during the creation process. The access level can also be specified when creating deploy keys via the API.

GitHub's engineering culture emphasizes the importance of meticulous performance measurement and monitoring, inspired by Coda Hale's "Metrics, Metrics Everywhere" talk. Initially, GitHub adopted Etsy's statsd, a Node.js-based metrics aggregation tool, to track performance across their infrastructure. However, as GitHub's growth led to increased data, statsd's UDP-based system began dropping significant amounts of data, prompting a reevaluation of their metrics system. The limitations of statsd's single-threaded, event-loop design in Node.js led GitHub to develop Brubeck, a new multi-threaded, C-based daemon designed for high throughput and reliability, which outperformed statsd by effectively handling up to 4.3 million metrics per second without packet loss. The introduction of Linux's SO_REUSEPORT further improved Brubeck's performance by allowing multiple threads to bind to the same port, enhancing scalability and simplifying code. After three years of successful use, GitHub released Brubeck as open-source, contributing back to the monitoring community that supported their development journey.

GitHub.com has introduced an updated site header to improve navigation and streamline user access to key features. The new header enhances the user experience by providing quicker access to dashboards for pull requests and issues from any page on the site, allowing users to efficiently track open tasks, mentions, and assignments across their projects. Additionally, clicking on the user avatar now reveals a dropdown menu with direct links to the user's profile, account settings, and a new "Your stars" link for easy access to starred repositories. These updates aim to simplify project management and enhance overall usability for GitHub users.

GitHub is introducing significant enhancements to organization permissions, aimed at improving collaboration and flexibility for teams working on code. These updates include customizable member privileges, fine-grained team permissions, and enhanced communication options. Key features include allowing members to view and mention all teams, create repositories independently, and form new teams for self-organization. Owners can also control access for contractors and interns without granting full member privileges. These improvements enable seamless teamwork without requiring everyone to have ownership status, with organization owners able to opt into these changes as they become available. The new permissions system is set to roll out to all organizations on GitHub.com in the coming months.

Git, a powerful version control system, provides various methods to "undo" changes, catering to different scenarios that users might encounter. For reversing a public commit already pushed to a repository, one can use the `git revert` command, which creates a new commit to negate the changes of a previous one without altering the commit history. If a commit message needs correction before pushing, `git commit --amend` allows users to modify the most recent commit, including its message. Local uncommitted changes can be reverted using `git checkout -- <filename>`, but this permanently discards the changes. For undoing recent local commits, `git reset` can rewind the repository's history, with the `--hard` option also discarding changes in the working directory. If users wish to recover changes after a hard reset, `git reflog` helps navigate the project's history to restore commits. Branch management and rebase functions allow users to reorganize commit history effectively, such as moving commits to a new branch or syncing with an updated base branch. Interactive rebasing (`git rebase -i`) offers granular control over the commit history, enabling users to squash, reorder, or omit commits. Lastly, to stop tracking a file mistakenly added to the repository, `git rm --cached` removes it from version control while keeping the local file intact.

GitHub has announced the formation of GitHub Japan G.K., marking its first official office outside the United States, located in Tokyo. This move highlights the significance of the Japanese open source community, as GitHub's platform is built on Rails, which itself is based on Ruby, a project originating in Japan. Japan has consistently ranked among the top 10 countries visiting GitHub since its inception in 2008, with a notable 60 percent increase in activity in 2014. Japanese businesses like Hitachi Systems, CyberAgent, and GREE are leveraging GitHub Enterprise to enhance their software development, and GitHub is committed to supporting this growth by offering Japanese language technical support and payment options in Japanese Yen. To stay informed about developments in their Tokyo office, followers can check updates on @GitHubJapan and github.co.jp, and they are encouraged to join a meetup in Osaka.

CodeConf, scheduled for June 25 and 26 in Nashville, will showcase the best offerings from the open source community, with a particular focus on the Atom ecosystem. The event will begin with a presentation by GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath and will feature talks from notable speakers such as @bolinfest on Nuclide, @lee-dohm on the Atom community, and @paulcbetts on Slack and Electron. Additionally, there will be an Atom workshop led by Nathan Sobo, providing an opportunity for attendees to engage with the core team and collaborate on Atom projects. Participants are encouraged to secure their tickets for both the conference and the workshop to fully experience the event.

GitHub for Windows has introduced several enhancements to improve user experience, including a more compact list of changed files in the working directory and a feature that lets users see specific changes within files. The updated interface includes a branch selector that groups recently used branches for easy access and a dedicated toolbar section for branch creation, allowing users to choose the base branch for new branches. Additionally, the repository list can now be collapsed to save screen space, and the software automatically updates to the latest version if already installed. These updates aim to streamline workflow and enhance usability for GitHub users on Windows.

GitHub has enhanced its Issues feature by introducing new filters to streamline the management of Issues and Pull Requests. Users can now utilize filters such as author, date, mentions, and team mentions to refine their lists. A notable addition is the "status:" filter, which allows users to sort Pull Requests based on their combined status using the Status API. This includes filtering for Pull Requests with all successful statuses using "status:success," those with failure or error statuses using "status:failure," and those with pending statuses using "status:pending." These updates aim to improve user efficiency and integration with existing tools.

Purchasing the Pridetocat Shirt supports three organizations—Lesbians Who Tech, Maven, and Trans*H4CK—that focus on empowering and connecting LGBTQ individuals in the tech industry. All proceeds from the shirt sales, available in the GitHub Shop until August 31st, are donated to these groups. Lesbians Who Tech is a global community of 9,000 queer women in tech, aiming to provide representation in both the tech and LGBTQ communities. Trans*H4CK organizes hackathons and speaker series to address social issues with open-source tech solutions and highlight transgender tech innovators. Maven collaborates with local LGBTQA organizations and tech professionals to offer free tech camps, workshops, and hackathons for queer youth.

GitHub employs a variant of the Flow pattern for code deployment where new code is deployed from a pull request branch and merged into the master branch only after it is confirmed in production. The master branch is deemed stable and production-ready, and any faulty code is rolled back by redeploying the latest master version. Deployments are conducted via Hubot commands in chat, providing company-wide visibility, and are logged in the GitHub API for timeline tracking. The deployment process includes features such as deploy queues, deploy guards, and deploy locks to manage and control the deployment flow, ensuring code passes continuous integration tests before deployment. Staging environments, including a unique "branch lab" for isolated testing, are used to replicate production conditions, allowing developers to safely test and refine their code. The workflow not only integrates deeply with chat and the GitHub API for transparency but also encourages frequent feedback and small iterations, minimizing merge conflicts and enhancing developer ownership and responsibility.