February 2016 Summaries

Git Merge 2016, held on April 5th at New York City’s New World Stages, features a lineup of prominent speakers and workshops centered around optimizing and scaling Git. Notable speakers include Greg Kroah-Hartman from the Linux Foundation, Ryan Hodson from CloudFlare, Emma Jane Hogbin Westby from UN-OCHA, and Git core contributor Patrick Reynolds from GitHub. The event promises engaging sessions on topics like Linux kernel development, Git for static websites, and Git scaling practices at GitHub. Additional talks will be given by experts from companies such as IBM, Atlassian, Autodesk, and Bloomberg. The event also includes training workshops, an Afterparty at SpinNYC, and is supported by online updates on git-merge.com and Twitter. Attendees are encouraged to secure tickets promptly due to limited availability.

GitHub has transitioned from using icon fonts to SVG icons across its platform, offering several advantages such as improved rendering quality, accessibility, and ease of integration. SVGs are rendered as images, ensuring crisp visuals at any resolution and eliminating issues like blurry icons in Webkit-based browsers. They also bypass issues related to font overrides, which previously caused layout disruptions for users who changed default typefaces for accessibility reasons. The transition to SVG allows for more flexible icon sizing, easy customization through CSS, and potential for animation, while also reducing CSS bundle bloat by eliminating font-based styles. Despite minor drawbacks like pixel-rounding errors in Firefox and specific requirements in Internet Explorer, the change enhances overall performance and user experience without significant impact on page load times, providing a cleaner and more efficient way to manage icons within GitHub's extensive codebase.

GitHub is introducing a new feature that allows users to upload files directly to their repositories via a web interface, eliminating the need to use the command line. This feature, which will be gradually rolled out, provides two options for file uploads: clicking the "Upload files" button in the toolbar or dragging and dropping files onto the file tree from the desktop. Once files are uploaded, users can choose to commit them to the default branch or create a new branch and initiate a pull request, similar to the existing "New file" functionality. This enhancement aims to streamline the process of adding files, benefiting both new and experienced users by offering a quicker and more convenient way to manage repositories.

Posters showcasing extraordinary Octocat moments are now available for purchase in three different sizes—8.5″x11″, 18″x24″, and 24″x36″—through the GitHub Shop, although frames are not included with the purchase. The announcement was made by Brandi Firestine, also known by the handle @bfire.

Project maintainers can now enhance collaboration by adding templates for Issues and Pull Requests, ensuring contributors provide essential details upfront. This new feature, developed in response to community feedback, allows for the creation of ISSUE_TEMPLATE and PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE files in the root directory or within a .github/ folder of a repository. These templates can include headings, links, mentions, and task lists using Markdown, minimizing clutter while maintaining functionality. This is part of a series of improvements aimed at streamlining project contributions, and further details can be accessed in the provided documentation.

The GitHub Importer is a tool that allows users to seamlessly transfer their source code from platforms like Subversion, Mercurial, Team Foundation Server, or other Git repositories to GitHub with ease. Once the import process is complete, users receive a notification either via email or directly in their browser, indicating that their GitHub repository is ready for use. This feature can be accessed directly through a specified URL or during the creation of a new repository on GitHub.com. Over 400,000 repositories have already utilized this feature to transition to GitHub. For more detailed guidance on migrating source code, users can refer to the “Importing your project to GitHub” section in GitHub Help.

GitHub Enterprise 2.5 introduces features aimed at enhancing scalability, security, and management for development teams, regardless of size. The update includes clustering to efficiently add users in large installations, enhanced caching to manage large data operations, and a preview of the Protected Branches API to ensure safe collaboration. Additionally, the release boasts a refreshed design for repositories and sign-in screens to improve user accessibility and navigation, as well as extended support for Subversion versions 1.8 and 1.9. These updates collectively aim to streamline the user experience and support the growing demands of large development teams.

Judy Gichoya, a medical doctor specializing in radiology and an experienced programmer, is significantly contributing to the growth of OpenMRS, an open-source medical record system aimed at improving healthcare delivery in resource-constrained environments. Her journey into software development began in Nairobi when she shifted from accounting to technology, self-teaching programming languages like Java and Python due to a lack of local mentors. Driven by a desire to better manage HIV-AIDS patient data during her clinical rotations, she became involved with OpenMRS, which has since grown into a global community with implementations in over 42 countries. Judy emphasizes the importance of passion and persistence in open source, given its challenges, and advocates for learning accessible programming languages in resource-limited settings. OpenMRS, initially developed by a group of physicians at a conference, has evolved into a vital tool for healthcare management, with a community that includes both developers and implementers. Despite its growth, challenges remain, such as improving diversity and encouraging code contributions from forked projects. Judy's work and the OpenMRS project highlight the potential of open-source software to transform healthcare, particularly in developing countries, by providing cost-effective, adaptable solutions to complex medical data needs.

GitHub's Security Bug Bounty program, launched two years ago, has been instrumental in identifying and rectifying security vulnerabilities, with 1,772 of 7,050 submissions warranting further review. This initiative has rewarded 58 researchers with a total of $95,300 for reporting 102 medium to high-risk vulnerabilities, covering all OWASP top 10 classifications. Notable discoveries include a browser vulnerability affecting GitHub cookies and an issue with RSA key generators producing weak SSH keys. The program has also seen vulnerabilities reported in GitHub's desktop apps, such as remote code execution exploits. In 2015, there was a notable increase in bounties donated to charitable causes, with GitHub matching these donations to organizations like the EFF and Médecins Sans Frontières. The program encourages ongoing participation and contributions from researchers to enhance GitHub's security landscape.

GitHub experienced a two-hour and six-minute outage due to a power disruption in their primary data center, which caused over 25% of servers and several network devices to reboot, leading to a cascading failure. Initial delays in response were exacerbated by rebooted ChatOps systems and a misunderstanding about a potential DDoS attack. Engineers worked to restore service by repairing booting issues and rebuilding Redis clusters on alternate hardware, eventually achieving recovery without data loss. Moving forward, GitHub plans to update firmware, improve dependency testing, enhance internal communication, and strengthen messaging to users to mitigate future incidents and improve recovery strategies.

Scientist 1.0 is a tool introduced by GitHub to ensure the correctness of rewritten critical code, particularly in scenarios where legacy systems need replacement or enhancement due to performance or extensibility issues. The tool employs an architectural pattern known as Branch by Abstraction, which allows developers to create a lightweight experiment around the existing code to compare outputs between the original and new code paths without affecting the production environment. By running both the old (control) and new (candidate) code paths simultaneously and comparing their results, Scientist identifies mismatches and performance discrepancies, enabling developers to iteratively refine the new system until it matches the legacy behavior. This approach goes beyond traditional testing by leveraging real production data to validate the system's behavior and is especially useful for read operations, as it avoids side-effects that could alter production data. Scientist is designed to be flexible, allowing developers to control when experiments are enabled and how results are published, ensuring that code changes are both safe and effective.

On February 10, a casual, hands-on workshop focused on Git, GitHub, and GitHub Pages will take place at WorkMarket in New York City, aimed at beginners interested in learning these tools. Attendees will experience the new Patchwork curriculum, which offers self-directed modules such as an Introduction to Git, Introduction to GitHub, and Creating a Site with GitHub Pages, all facilitated by GitHub experts and local community mentors. The event promises a relaxed atmosphere with support for those facing challenges, allowing participants to learn at their own pace while enjoying food, refreshments, and the opportunity to network with others. Attendees are encouraged to sign up for a free GitHub account in advance to maximize their experience, and those interested in mentoring future contributors can also participate.

GitHub Pages has upgraded to Jekyll 3.0, significantly simplifying the process of publishing sites by introducing kramdown as the default Markdown engine and Rouge for syntax highlighting, eliminating the need for Python and Pygments. This update offers a more intuitive Markdown experience familiar to GitHub users, with kramdown's GitHub-flavored Markdown providing compatibility with previously used engines like Rdiscount and Redcarpet. Jekyll 3.0 also enhances site preview and optimization with faster local builds and a liquid profiler for build time analysis. This update, effective from May 1st, 2016, discontinues support for Textile and relative permalinks, encouraging users to adopt Markdown and adjust permalink directives accordingly. These changes aim to make the GitHub Pages experience faster and more user-friendly for both new and experienced users, with resources available for those needing guidance on the upgrade.

Git submodules provide a way to include one or more repositories as sub-folders within another repository, which can be useful for projects that rely on external libraries or frameworks. While they can be tricky to work with and may not always be the best solution, submodules allow developers to manage dependencies by embedding repositories like Rock into another project, such as Slingshot. When collaborating on these projects, it is essential for team members to run specific Git commands, like `git submodule update --init --recursive`, to ensure the submodule contents are fully downloaded. Transitioning an existing folder into a submodule involves creating a standalone repository, as demonstrated with the rubber-band component, and updating the original project to reference the new submodule. Although submodules can help maintain consistency by locking content to a specific SHA, they can also complicate development, especially in dynamic or interdependent environments, as they require collaborators to manually update the submodules to reflect any changes. Despite their complexities, submodules can manage simple, static parent-child relationships effectively, though alternative tools might be more suitable for managing dependencies in more modern and complex workflows.