December 2015 Summaries

GitHub's Professional Services team effectively utilizes the platform's features to manage and coordinate their work beyond just code-related tasks, emphasizing transparency, collaboration, and efficient communication. The team uses GitHub repositories, Issues, and Pull Requests to streamline interactions both within the team and with customers, providing clear documentation and tracking of engagements and decision-making processes. They maintain a team repository with a README file to introduce their services, use @mentions for targeted communication, and conduct weekly meetings to stay connected as a distributed team. This approach enables them to document their work comprehensively, ensuring that decisions and changes are recorded for future reference. The team's practices highlight GitHub's potential to transform workflows and foster a collaborative company culture, demonstrating its utility in various non-code related aspects of organizational management.

Ruby, a programming language admired for its human-focused design, is at the center of a new educational initiative developed in collaboration with Udacity, offering three Nanodegree programs. The first course, Beginning Ruby, is currently open for enrollment, with Ruby on Rails and Senior Ruby on Rails scheduled for release in 2016. These programs, featuring insights from GitHub Ruby experts such as Jesse Toth and John Britton, are designed to bridge the talent gap by equipping aspiring developers with essential skills. Students typically dedicate 10-15 hours weekly, completing a Nanodegree in 4-9 months, and the cost is $200 per month, with the potential for a 50% refund upon graduation.

GitHub has been tackling technical debt accrued over its rapid growth by refining and rewriting parts of its codebase to improve efficiency and maintain high engineering standards. A notable example is the recent replacement of a critical code path responsible for merges in pull requests. Historically, GitHub used a custom merge strategy due to limitations in Git's default merge tools, but these presented performance and cleanup challenges. To address this, GitHub leveraged libgit2, a re-implementation of Git's low-level APIs, to develop a more efficient in-memory merge engine that avoids disk usage. Transitioning to this new system involved extensive testing using Scientist, a library designed to compare old and new code paths in production without affecting users. This approach allowed GitHub to identify and resolve mismatches and performance issues efficiently, leading to a seamless switch to the new implementation. The effort not only improved performance but also led to the discovery and correction of bugs in both the original Git implementation and the new libgit2 setup. This systematic and experimental approach to refactoring ensures GitHub can manage technical debt effectively while maintaining robust and reliable service.

GitHub hosted Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro to discuss ConnectHome, a pioneering public-private partnership aimed at providing high-speed internet access to over 102,000 low-income households in public housing, affecting nearly 200,000 children. The initiative seeks to bridge the digital divide, which disproportionately affects low-income residents of color and impedes their educational and job opportunities. GitHub is significantly investing in ConnectHome with a $500,000 financial commitment, $3 million in product support, and staff time, emphasizing the importance of connectivity in fostering innovation and breaking cycles of poverty. The company encourages others in the tech sector to contribute financially and join the initiative to support digital equity and cultivate a diverse talent pool for the future tech workforce.

During Computer Science Education Week, the global initiative Hour of Code, inspired by Code.org, aims to dispel the stereotype that programming is exclusive to certain individuals by encouraging students worldwide to spend an hour learning to code. This movement has reached millions of students in over 180 countries, offering engaging programming tutorials developed by leading industry figures such as Star Wars producer Kathleen Kennedy and Mojang's Lead Developer. Volunteers can participate by dedicating an hour to assist classrooms either in person or via video chat, with further involvement opportunities detailed in a volunteer guide. Additionally, a workshop is scheduled for December 12th to support K-5 educators in fostering coding skills among children, continuing the effort to integrate computer science education beyond the designated week.

Swift, Apple's powerful programming language, has been made open source on GitHub, allowing developers to contribute bug fixes and enhancements and expand its reach to new platforms. This move aligns with Apple's longstanding commitment to open source, as evidenced by its use of the Darwin kernel and UNIX utilities in its operating systems, contributions to open web standards through WebKit, and involvement in the LLVM compiler infrastructure. The open-sourcing of Swift is anticipated to foster innovation and collaboration, with a showcase of projects already built with the language available for inspiration and a welcoming invitation for developers to participate in its ongoing development.

GitHub has developed an application called gPanel to manage its transition from a managed environment to its own data center, emphasizing stability, availability, and performance through the use of bare-metal hardware. gPanel, a Ruby on Rails application, facilitates the tracking, management, and provisioning of physical hardware, retaining the benefits of cloud computing like on-demand resources. The system automates the installation and configuration of operating systems, reducing the dependency on specific knowledge and allowing the operations team to handle the migration efficiently. The process involves several stages, including data collection, hardware configuration, firmware upgrades, burn-in processes, and finally, making machines ready for production. Hubot, GitHub's programmable chatbot, is used to drive these processes, including installing operating systems and decommissioning hosts, ensuring that new hardware is seamlessly integrated and made available for company use. GitHub continues to refine gPanel to further automate and improve the procurement and provisioning process.