September 2017 Summaries

Hacktoberfest, an annual event in October in collaboration with DigitalOcean, celebrates open source software by encouraging global participation in contributing to projects, ranging from documentation enhancements to feature development. In its fourth iteration, it has seen significant engagement, with over 90,000 pull requests made by contributors from 114 countries in the previous year. The event not only fosters community engagement but also helps first-time contributors transition into regular contributors and maintainers. Participants are motivated by the opportunity to make impactful contributions and the incentive of receiving a limited-edition t-shirt for completing four valid pull requests. The event encourages contributions by searching for projects with the 'hacktoberfest' label and promotes sharing experiences on social media using the #hacktoberfest hashtag.

GitHub for Visual Studio 2.3 introduces a new feature that allows users to comment on pull requests directly within the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Users can access this functionality by opening a pull request in the GitHub pane and using the compare view to see and add comments in the editor. Currently, the feature supports only single comments, but there are plans to integrate the full GitHub review process into Visual Studio in the future. This update is part of a broader release that includes various new features and bug fixes, with further details available in the release notes. The announcement was made by Steven Kirk.

GitHub has introduced GitHub Debug, a new tool designed to help users troubleshoot connection issues to the platform by simulating the github.com environment and using standard networking tools to gather data such as download speed, packet loss, and routing. This tool leverages GeoDNS and the same certificate authority as GitHub, and it uses a user's public IP to assess their connection. Users experiencing problems connecting to GitHub, either via the command line or browser, can visit github-debug.com to diagnose issues themselves or provide the collected data to GitHub's Support Team for further assistance. This initiative aims to offer users a more efficient and hands-on approach to resolving connectivity challenges, enhancing their overall experience on the platform.

Two new game-inspired decals, "Boxing Mona" and "Adventure Mona," are available to protect laptops from scratches while adding a unique flair. These Vinyl Disorder decals, designed to fit laptops of all brands, come in two sizes: small for 11″-13″ laptops and large for 15″-17″ laptops. Created by Natalie Siskin, these decals offer both aesthetic appeal and practical protection, ensuring that your laptop remains stylish and safeguarded against damage.

GitHub Desktop 1.0 has been launched, offering a streamlined and unified experience for collaborating on GitHub through a GUI application built on Electron. After a public beta phase that began in May, the application has been enhanced with features like image diffs, which allow users to easily compare changed images, and faster cloning capabilities, including parallel downloads of Git LFS assets. It integrates seamlessly with editors and shells, and supports GitHub Enterprise, making it suitable for both personal and company projects. GitHub Desktop is open source, encouraging community contributions and collaboration, and users can choose to continue using the classic Mac or Windows apps until they are ready to transition to the new version.

GitHub has introduced accessibility enhancements to its Projects feature, improving navigation and management for users who depend on assistive technology or prefer keyboard use. These enhancements include new keyboard shortcuts that allow users to move and navigate between cards and columns more efficiently, with actions like selecting and relocating cards or columns using the enter key, and committing or canceling changes using the enter or escape keys, respectively. Users can press the ? key to access detailed information about the shortcuts. This update marks the beginning of GitHub's efforts to make project management more accessible, with the company inviting feedback on additional improvements.

In June, GitHub hosted its inaugural Constellation conference in Tokyo, marking its debut in Japan and the beginning of a series of global events aimed at software builders and entrepreneurs. Each Constellation event is tailored to the host city, typically featuring two segments: one for the local GitHub community and another focusing on professional uses of GitHub. The event series is set to visit multiple cities, including Munich, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Madrid, Milan, Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin, with additional locations to be announced. Interested participants are encouraged to sign up for updates and register for events that align with their interests.

Earlier this year, GitHub announced plans to deprecate several weak cryptographic standards, including TLSv1, TLSv1.1, diffie-hellman-group1-sha1, and diffie-hellman-group14-sha1, with a target date for disabling these protocols set for February 1, 2018. In preparation, GitHub has enabled the diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256 key exchange, which is widely supported and allows most legacy clients to transition away smoothly from outdated algorithms. Despite this, a small percentage of traffic still uses the older key exchanges due to client preferences or lack of support for the newer algorithm, primarily from older versions of a popular Java library, JSch. GitHub is conducting a deeper analysis to identify and assist projects using outdated libraries to ensure a seamless transition before the deprecation deadline.

Git LFS version 2.3.0 introduces significant performance enhancements and new features, notably improving the speed and efficiency of operations like `git lfs migrate` and `git clone`. The update includes a native implementation for reading packed objects, which accelerates the migration process by 52% and enhances the examination of repositories for large objects. Additionally, `git clone` has become 170% faster for repositories using Git LFS, matching the speed of the deprecated `git lfs clone` wrapper, thanks to simultaneous object batching and transferring. These advancements, along with new transfer agents, release targets, and updated documentation, are supported by contributions from the Git LFS open-source community, as highlighted by Taylor Blau, a Principal Software Engineer at GitHub.

GitHub Universe 2017 has announced its Community Partners, selected based on their efforts to lower barriers for underrepresented groups in tech, their potential audience benefiting from conference tickets, and their positive social impact in the conference region. These partners include organizations like Code Tenderloin, which aids individuals facing employment barriers; AnnieCannons, training human trafficking survivors in software; Techqueria, supporting Latinx professionals in tech; /dev/color, developing Black software engineers into leaders; Older Women Coders, empowering senior women in STEM; Code2040, creating pathways for Black and Latinx success in tech; Operation Code, assisting military community members in tech careers; and Telegraph Track, supporting underrepresented students at Hack Reactor. These partners exemplify GitHub’s commitment to diversity and inclusion by fostering innovation through diverse community engagement.

GitHub Enterprise 2.11 introduces several enhancements designed to improve the efficiency and organization of development processes, including geo-replication for faster request fulfillment through geographically distributed data centers, and hotpatching for reducing downtime during patch upgrades. The update also offers nested team permissions, allowing for better management of access in complex team structures by ensuring child teams inherit permissions from their parent teams. Code review processes are streamlined with the addition of team reviews and code owners, which facilitate comprehensive evaluations and prevent erroneous merges. Developers can quickly navigate changed methods and functions in code reviews for languages such as Go, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and TypeScript, thus enhancing the understanding of code modifications. Additional features include badges for first-time contributors, keyword updates, project card filtering, and support resources to guide users effectively. These updates aim to enhance performance, collaboration, and code management within high availability environments.

In collaboration with Facebook, Atom-IDE has been launched as a set of optional packages that enhance the Atom text editor with integrated development environment (IDE) functionalities. The initial release offers features such as context-aware auto-completion, navigation tools like outline view and goto-definition, alongside functions for handling errors, warnings, and document formatting. Atom-IDE currently supports languages including C#, Flow, Java, JavaScript, PHP, and TypeScript by leveraging language servers for in-depth syntactic analysis. The initiative aims to expand its language support and capabilities further, with community collaboration playing a key role in its development, ultimately aspiring to evolve Atom-IDE into a comprehensive IDE. Interested users can explore more details and learn how to contribute by visiting the Atom Blog.

GitHub for Unity has released its 0.19-alpha "Swashbuckler" version, featuring enhanced macOS support, bug fixes, and performance improvements, many of which were contributed by the community. This update ensures feature parity between the macOS and Windows versions and resolves issues with garbled commit messages, thanks to contributions from community members like @shiena. Commit logs now adhere to recommended styles, improving usability for those using command-line tools. Notable enhancements include a custom fork of Axosoft’s NSFW library for consistent UI refresh and best practices applied in code refactoring by @MunchyYDL. Users are advised to note the relocation of the plugin folder and follow specific instructions for upgrading. The alpha version is freely available to GitHub and Unity users, with detailed release notes listing all new features and improvements.

Visibility is crucial for managing complex networks, and as GitHub's network expanded, they enhanced their data collection processes, particularly through metric tagging. This allows the creation of dashboards that can drill down into specific issues by filtering multiple dimensions. An example provided details a rolling update on spine switches, showcasing how traffic flow was monitored to ensure no disruption. Metrics collected include interface statistics and device health, gathered via SNMP, which is complex but essential for effective monitoring. Data is collected by regional nodes cycling every 10 seconds, ensuring continuity even if a host fails. While their system is not open-source due to specific hardware dependencies, GitHub continues to evolve its monitoring capabilities and is seeking to expand its Site Reliability Engineering team.

GitHub Marketplace offers a variety of tools to simplify software development by integrating directly with your coding environment, with the recent addition of five new apps and a new "Deployment" category. These tools aim to streamline processes such as deployment, continuous integration, localization, monitoring, and security. For deployment and continuous integration, Buddy and Semaphore provide automation pipelines and support for Docker and Kubernetes, while Crowdin offers seamless localization management with GitHub integration. Airbrake focuses on monitoring applications to quickly identify and address issues, and Snyk helps developers detect and fix security vulnerabilities in open-source libraries. These apps enable development teams to reduce complexity, minimize errors, and enhance collaboration, allowing them to focus more effectively on their products.

The inaugural edition of the Release Radar highlights a diverse array of projects, ranging from data visualization tools to game development engines, all created by various developers. Notable releases include Lottie for iOS 2.0.0, which facilitates real-time animation rendering in apps; FlameGraph 1.0 for visualizing software code paths; Drupal Console 1.0.0, a command line interface enhancing Drupal development; and Redash 2.0 for data querying and visualization. Additional projects such as STF 3.0, facilitating smartphone testing, and react-map-gl 3.0, for interactive map rendering, are showcased alongside the Starcraft II API and PySC2 1.0, which advance AI and game interaction. Amazon's Lumberyard 1.10 and .NET Core 2.0 also make significant appearances, offering enhanced game engine capabilities and a modular platform for cross-platform application development, respectively. Each project reflects the vibrant and collaborative nature of the open-source community, as developers continue to innovate and share their work across various domains.