September 2015 Summaries

Hacktoberfest, organized by DigitalOcean and hosted on GitHub, is a month-long celebration of open source coding held every October, where participants can contribute to any open source project by submitting pull requests. Participants can engage by fixing bugs, adding new features, or improving documentation, and are encouraged to share their contributions using the #hacktoberfest hashtag. Each day of the event, a different open source project seeking contributors is featured on the Hacktoberfest website to inspire participation. To receive a free, limited edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt, participants must sign up on the Hacktoberfest website and successfully submit at least four pull requests by the end of October, after which DigitalOcean will collect shipping details to distribute the shirts.

GitHub has introduced significant enhancements to organization permissions on GitHub.com, providing organizations with increased flexibility and improved team collaboration. These updates include customizable member privileges, detailed team permissions, and enhanced communication features, allowing members to view and mention all teams and create repositories independently. Additionally, members can form new teams to collaborate more effectively, while organization owners can assign specific access levels to contractors and interns without granting full member privileges. These improvements, announced a few months prior, are being gradually rolled out, enabling organization owners to tailor their workflow preferences.

GitHub Universe offers a series of sessions aimed at enhancing GitHub skills, featuring speakers who provide insights on various topics such as pull requests, workflow strategy, and GitHub Enterprise. Brent Beer discusses effective pull requests and workflow optimization, while Matt Colyer focuses on GitHub Enterprise fundamentals and feature utilization. Peter Bell from Wheelhouse.io presents strategies for knowledge sharing and support, and Ben Balter along with the GitHub Pages team delves into advanced content publishing techniques. Additionally, Matt Duff provides guidance on maximizing GitHub Enterprise security, and Mozilla’s Myk Melez talks about integrating Offline Web Apps with GitHub Pages. The event promises to deliver both educational and entertaining content for participants.

A Patchwork hack night event is scheduled for October 14 in Boston, Massachusetts, hosted in collaboration with Wistia, where GitHub users and local mentors will guide participants through learning Git and GitHub in an informal, self-paced setting. The event welcomes individuals without coding experience and promises attendees the opportunity to create their first open-source project, achieve a merged pull request, and gain confidence in contributing to the open-source community. Mentors are encouraged to assist newcomers in this interactive and engaging environment, which also offers snacks and a chance to socialize. Participants are encouraged to RSVP as either attendees or mentors and must have a GitHub account prior to attending. The venue is wheelchair accessible, and the organizers will provide food and refreshments, accommodating any disclosed food allergies.

Git 2.6.0 introduces several notable features aimed at improving the functionality and flexibility of the open-source version control system. Among these enhancements, users can now adjust the severity of fsck warnings, allowing them to ignore specific errors or set them to a less critical level, improving the management of minor data issues. This release also enhances the git status command during interactive rebase, providing more context on progress, and introduces custom date formatting in commit logs using the strftime function, allowing for personalized and localized date displays. Additionally, the --cc option in git log now automatically shows diffs for merge commits, eliminating the need to specify the -p option separately. These updates are part of a broader set of changes in Git v2.6, which includes contributions from 67 developers, highlighting the collaborative nature of this project under the longstanding maintenance of Junio C Hamano.

GitHub Universe is set to take place at Pier 70, offering a range of activities and resources for attendees, including transportation options like bike valets and discounts for Uber users, with no parking available on-site. The event, held in an industrial space, encourages attendees to wear closed-toe shoes and bring layers for varying temperatures, while providing ASL interpretation and a nursing room for accessibility. Participants can sign up for complimentary consultations with the GitHub Services team on a first-come, first-served basis to discuss various Git-related topics. The event promotes networking through the Gitter app, and an after-party will feature musical performances and interactive installations. Public tickets for the after-party are available for those unable to attend the main event, with updates being shared via @githubuniverse on social media.

Patchwork Manila is organizing a hack night on October 22, co-hosted with Ateneo de Manila University, aimed at helping beginners learn Git and GitHub in a relaxed and informal setting. GitHub employees and local community mentors will guide participants through the process of completing a "Hello World" tutorial, creating their first open-source project, and achieving their first merged Pull Request, with no prior coding experience necessary. The event promises a hands-on, self-directed learning experience supplemented by the support of mentors, and participants will leave with increased confidence to engage with the open-source community. Taking place at Ateneo de Manila University, the event offers food, refreshments, and is wheelchair-accessible, emphasizing its inclusive approach. Attendees are encouraged to RSVP and create a GitHub account in advance to ensure a smooth start to the evening.

GitHub has expanded its feature set to allow users to attach a variety of document types to issues and pull request comments, in addition to images. The supported file formats now include Microsoft Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx), Excel (.xlsx), text files (.txt), and PDF documents (.pdf). Users can easily add these files by dragging and dropping them into the comment box, facilitating enhanced communication and collaboration within the platform.

GitHub Universe sessions emphasize the transformative impact of open source on software development, with topics including Facebook's use of open source security tools to build community trust and resilience, and the concept of "inner-sourcing" to enhance internal engineering teams by applying open source principles. Speakers like Christine Abernathy and Teddy Reed from Facebook and GitHub's Brandon Keepers highlight the importance of open source in fostering collaborative engineering and producing high-quality software. Additionally, Enrique Mogollan from One Medical Group discusses the vital role of positive feedback in creating safe learning environments that enhance coding skills, particularly within the Ruby community. These sessions offer insights into how open source and collaborative practices can lead to improved software design and community engagement.

Classroom for GitHub is a tool designed to facilitate teaching by simplifying the process of distributing starter repositories, managing assignments, and providing feedback through GitHub's platform. It offers educators automation in creating repositories and managing access, thus easing the administration of large courses while exposing students to essential software development practices such as version control and code review. Teachers can create assignments, distribute them via private invitation URLs, and provide optional starter code for both individual and group work. The platform allows co-teachers and teaching assistants to manage assignments by adding them as organization administrators. As an open-source project, Classroom for GitHub encourages community contributions, with notable contributions from students like Mark Tareshawty through initiatives such as GitHub Summer of Code.

Over the past two years, GitHub's Systems Team has been focused on improving the performance of Git operations, such as cloning and fetching, by addressing inefficiencies in object counting. Traditionally, Git operations involved a time-consuming "Counting Objects" phase due to the need to track the Directed Acyclic Graph structure of repositories. To tackle this, GitHub explored caching strategies but found them impractical due to the dynamic nature of active repositories and high storage costs. Instead, they adopted a bitmap index approach, inspired by Google’s JGit engineers, which significantly reduced CPU time for network operations by marking reachable objects without traversing the entire graph. Although initial implementations faced challenges, such as slower compression due to Git's aggressive delta storage strategy, GitHub developed a heuristic that optimized the way objects were delta’ed, leading to a dramatic performance boost. This innovation, which reduced average CPU time for Git operations by over 90%, was eventually upstreamed in Git 2.0, benefiting the broader Git community and saving users significant time in network operations.

GitHub emphasizes the importance of using a content delivery network (CDN) for efficiently distributing static assets while acknowledging the potential security risks, such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, associated with relying on third-party services. Although CDNs enhance web performance by serving content from geographically proximate data centers, a compromised CDN could pose significant security threats by distributing malicious JavaScript. To mitigate such risks, Subresource Integrity (SRI) is a new browser technology that allows websites to verify the integrity of fetched resources by comparing cryptographic digests, thereby preventing compromised CDNs from becoming XSS vectors. GitHub has actively implemented various security measures, including SRI and Content Security Policy, to protect against vulnerabilities, and encourages other websites to adopt these practices to enhance overall web safety. The article also notes the current state of browser support for SRI, with Google Chrome having implemented it and Mozilla Firefox planning to do so, while Microsoft Edge considers future support.

Subresource Integrity (SRI) enhances the security of using GitHub by ensuring that browsers verify the integrity of JavaScript and CSS files delivered by GitHub's Content Delivery Network (CDN), protecting against potential attacks from compromised CDNs. This security feature requires the use of modern browsers, such as Google Chrome, to function effectively. Although SRI contributes to making the web safer, its efficacy depends on websites implementing it, which GitHub has done and encourages others to follow. More detailed information on SRI and its adoption by GitHub can be found on the GitHub Engineering blog, as discussed by Ben Toews.

GitHub Universe's inaugural conference on October 1-2 will feature a diverse array of engaging activities and experiences supported by various sponsoring companies. Attendees can look forward to art installations and entertainment, including an after-party with interactive installations and music, sponsored by Huawei. Comfortable lounges will be provided by Heroku, Microsoft, and AWS, offering a relaxing environment. Installation sponsors such as Travis-CI, Waffle.io, Target, GitKraken, and Digital Ocean will enhance the visual experience, while Twilio adds an interactive scavenger hunt for unique prizes. Compose.io will serve Ritual coffee, and Stack Overflow offers custom-branded notebooks for note-taking. Community sponsors like Appnovation and Cisco also support the event. The conference invites last-minute sponsorships and encourages attendees to secure tickets before they sell out.

The GitHub Universe conference schedule is announced, featuring a variety of sessions and speakers aimed at celebrating the GitHub community. The event starts each day at 8:30 AM with registration and breakfast, followed by opening keynotes from GitHub leaders Chris Wanstrath and Nicole Sanchez. Attendees can look forward to hearing from influential figures such as Dr. Yvonne Pendleton from NASA, Kellan Elliot-McCrea formerly of Etsy, and Dr. Michael B. Johnson from Pixar, among others. The conference includes 24 breakout sessions covering topics like code deployment at Airbnb, open-source security at Facebook, and development metrics at Spotify. Additional highlights include talks by executives from companies like Autodesk, GE, and Mozilla, as well as presentations from developer tool companies like Travis CI and Bugsnag. The event also features an afterparty on October 1st with music, food, and socializing opportunities. A scholarship program is available to assist attendees, and tickets are still on sale for the event taking place on October 1st and 2nd.

Connecting a GitHub repository to a Microsoft Azure instance streamlines the process of continuous deployment for web apps, allowing developers to efficiently push critical bug fixes and new features. This setup can be completed in under 10 minutes, requiring an existing Azure web app instance. Once the app is running, users can configure continuous deployment by linking the app to a specific GitHub repository and branch, typically the master branch, facilitating automatic deployment of any changes. This integration ensures that updates are live on the internet immediately after merging pull requests into the designated branch, thereby enhancing development productivity and focusing efforts on delivering quality code. Additional resources, such as video tutorials and detailed documentation, are available for further guidance on this process.

GitHub's Social Impact team, led by VP Nicole Sanchez, is excited to announce initiatives to make the GitHub Universe conference more accessible to diverse participants within the tech community. Recognizing that high ticket costs can be a barrier, GitHub has partnered with various organizations like Avión Ventures, Black Star Media, and others to distribute tickets to those traditionally excluded from tech and open source communities. Additionally, a scholarship program has been established, allowing individuals to apply for tickets by explaining their potential benefits from attending. Supporters can contribute by purchasing scholarship tickets, which are then donated to deserving applicants. Attendees are reminded to book hotel accommodations at discounted rates before the deadline.

GitHub Pages now offers an easier way for users to subscribe to blog updates through the Jekyll Feed plugin, which automatically generates an Atom feed of recent posts, eliminating the need for manually written XML and addressing technical issues like encoding and URLs. This plugin allows content creators to focus on their writing while ensuring their audience receives updates seamlessly. The announcement was made by Ben Balter, GitHub's Chief of Staff for Security, who has an extensive background in managing GitHub's enterprise offerings and ensuring the platform's safety and compliance, as well as promoting open-source adoption within government organizations worldwide.

GitHub is introducing a new feature called Protected Branches, aimed at preventing accidental overwrites by disabling force pushes to specific branches, thereby safeguarding collaborative work. This feature allows repository administrators to designate branches as protected, which not only blocks force pushes but also enforces required status checks through the Status API. These checks ensure that branches are up-to-date and that tests will pass before any merging occurs, with the option to disable the merge button until they do. The "Update branch" button, part of this feature, facilitates merging the latest changes from the base branch of a Pull Request with just one click, enhancing the integrity and reliability of collaborative coding efforts.

GitHub Universe is a prominent event scheduled for October 1st and 2nd in San Francisco, featuring over 30 speakers from various industries who will discuss how their teams create outstanding software through collaboration. The event will include keynotes from influential figures such as Chris Wanstrath, GitHub's Co-founder and CEO, and other notable leaders from organizations like NASA, Pixar, and Facebook. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage with sessions showcasing the diverse GitHub community, including open source teams, enterprise customers, and partners sharing their insights. The complete list of speakers and detailed scheduling information is available on the event's website, and tickets are still available for those interested in attending.