November 2017 Summaries

Hacktoberfest has concluded with significant success, marked by over 200,000 merged pull requests across almost 65,000 repositories, involving nearly 32,000 participants from around the globe and over 100 community-organized events. The event saw contributions from Berlin to Bangalore, with open source maintainers playing a crucial role by preparing and merging issues, ensuring the smooth flow of projects. DigitalOcean's sponsorship and support were pivotal in making the event possible. Participants are encouraged to continue their involvement in open source projects beyond Hacktoberfest, with resources available for finding new projects to contribute to. Additionally, participants who completed the necessary pull requests can inquire about their special edition shirts if they haven't received emails regarding them.

24 Pull Requests is an annual initiative that encourages developers to contribute to open source projects during the holiday season by submitting 24 pull requests between December 1 and December 24. Last year, nearly 3,000 developers participated, contributing to over 6,000 open source projects. The 24 Pull Requests web app provides information about the event, helps developers find projects in need, and visualizes their contributions on a calendar. Participants can contribute in various ways, such as fixing bugs or adding documentation, by signing in with their GitHub accounts to track their contributions. The event is promoted by Lee Reilly, a Senior Program Manager at GitHub, known for supporting developer communities and organizing hackathons and game jams.

Jekyll, the open source project behind GitHub Pages, has expanded its theme offerings from a dozen to hundreds of community-curated themes, allowing users to customize their site's appearance more extensively by adding a specific line to their site's _config.yml file. To make a Jekyll theme accessible to others, creators must develop a Gem-based theme and ensure their repository is public, with further guidance available in the Jekyll theme documentation. This announcement is shared by Ben Balter, GitHub's Chief of Staff for Security, who has an extensive background in managing GitHub's enterprise offerings and enhancing the platform's safety and security through numerous feature developments. Balter previously focused on promoting open source practices among government organizations worldwide, advocating for transparency and collaboration in software development.

Hubot, a friendly six-inch robot figurine made of metal or vinyl, is now available in the GitHub Shop and is being promoted as a fun addition to developers' workspaces during the holiday season. As part of a Cyber Sale, customers can purchase Hubot and other GitHub gear, such as hoodies and stickers, at a 30% discount using the code GHSALE2017, with free shipping on orders over $75 between November 24-29. This promotion, written by Natalie Siskin, aims to give customers ample opportunity to enjoy savings on a range of GitHub merchandise.

GitHub has introduced a new feature called Team Discussions to facilitate various non-coding aspects of software development, such as planning, analysis, and project decision-making. This feature provides a dedicated space with a unique URL for team conversations, preventing clutter in issues and pull requests and allowing easy sharing and referencing across the platform. Users can start or join discussions from their dashboard, with the option to make posts public or private, ensuring sensitive information is only accessible to specific team members. The feature leverages nested team functionalities to streamline notification distribution, and users can manage their notifications by subscribing or unsubscribing to specific discussions or entire teams. Support for Team Discussions is expected to expand with future updates to GitHub API v3, v4, and GitHub Enterprise, as part of GitHub's ongoing efforts to enhance collaboration and communication within development teams.

Wilhelm Klopp, a University College London student and creator of the popular Slack integration Simple Poll, spent a summer as a Developer Relations Intern with GitHub Education, where he initiated the "GitHub Field Day" event at GitHub HQ in San Francisco. The event aimed to address the challenge of knowledge transfer within student communities by bringing together tech student leaders to share insights and experiences. The successful launch of Field Day, which included branding, announcements, and logistics, attracted significant interest and participation from students eager to enhance their community-building skills and foster inter-campus connections. The event featured discussions on topics like learning design for coding beginners and developing group identities, and it even included an impromptu Q&A with GitHub’s Senior Vice President of Technology. Field Day has since expanded to multiple events globally, continuing its mission of empowering student tech leaders.

GitHub has enhanced its dependency graph feature, initially available for JavaScript and Ruby, to include security alerts for projects with dependencies, benefiting both public and private repositories. This update notifies users of vulnerabilities detected in their dependencies and suggests fixes from the GitHub community, aiming to improve code safety by leveraging GitHub's extensive open-source data. Users can enable the dependency graph and receive security alerts automatically for public repositories, while private repositories require opting in. Administrators have default access to these alerts and can configure additional recipients. The alerts are based on vulnerabilities with CVE IDs from the National Vulnerability Database, though GitHub acknowledges that not all vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed with these IDs. This initiative marks a significant step in GitHub's ongoing efforts to enhance security measures, with plans to expand support to Python in 2018.

In Taichi Furuhashi's course "Introduction to Spatial Information Systems I" at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan, students actively engage in solving real-world problems by collaborating with organizations such as the American Red Cross and the UN through projects that focus on disaster relief and data accuracy. The program emphasizes student engagement and active learning, enabling students to develop tools and provide crucial data to aid NGOs and industry partners during emergencies. For instance, during the 2017 heavy rains and flooding in Asakura City, students used the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team's tasking manager to map affected regions, contributing to decision-making for resource allocation. As the Director of OpenStreetMap Foundation Japan, Furuhashi integrates students into open-source communities, teaching them to use platforms like GitHub for data analysis and project collaboration, while providing resources such as a slide deck to facilitate their onboarding into these communities.

Teletype for Atom is a tool designed to facilitate real-time collaborative coding by allowing developers to work together seamlessly in their own programming environments using the Atom editor. Released in beta, Teletype enables multiple users to edit code simultaneously with their configurations intact, thanks to keystroke-level sharing rather than pixel-level. The tool leverages encrypted peer-to-peer connections to ensure privacy and reduce latency, as server interference is minimized. As an open-source project, Teletype invites community contributions for future enhancements, including potential features like voice communication and collaboration across different editors, marking the beginning of a new era of social coding with Atom.

GitHub Marketplace is expanding with the addition of four new applications designed to enhance various aspects of software development, including code review, deployment, localization, and dependency management. SideCI acts as a code review assistant that automatically analyzes pull requests to detect issues such as coding standard violations and security concerns, thereby improving review efficiency and product delivery. Codefresh facilitates continuous integration by streamlining deployment to Kubernetes and managing container lifecycles, allowing agile teams to receive rapid feedback and conduct testing more efficiently. POEditor provides a collaborative platform for localization management, enabling product and localization managers, developers, and translators to work together on multilingual software projects. MyGet offers hosted feeds for various package managers, supporting developers and teams in creating and managing artifact feeds and transforming source code into compiled packages directly from GitHub repositories. These tools are intended to optimize workflows and improve productivity for development teams using GitHub Marketplace.

Archiving a repository on GitHub allows it to become read-only, preserving its content without accepting further contributions, which is useful when development is no longer active but deletion is not desired. Once archived, all interactions such as editing, creating issues, pull requests, and comments are disabled, although the repository can still be forked for continued development elsewhere. Before archiving, it is recommended to adjust settings, close open issues and pull requests, and update the README to inform visitors of its archived status. If necessary, repositories can be unarchived to restore full functionality, though most settings are inaccessible while archived.

Continuous Integration (CI) tools are essential for maintaining quality standards in software development by executing tests with every new commit and relaying performance results to pull requests. When combined with Continuous Delivery (CD) tools, they extend capabilities to include testing on diverse configurations, conducting performance evaluations, and automating the entire path to production. Various CI/CD tools are available, many of which can be easily integrated via GitHub Marketplace, allowing customization based on specific needs such as programming language, application architecture, and team expertise. Popular GitHub projects often display their CI/CD integration statuses as badges, highlighting the widespread use of these tools across millions of repositories. Analysis of GitHub data reveals a diverse array of CI tools employed by development teams, including Travis CI, Circle CI, and Jenkins, among others, often used in tandem to leverage each tool's strengths. Despite the temptation to opt for default systems, exploring tailored options provides better performance and flexibility, underscoring the importance of choosing the right tool for the job and the ease of switching tools if requirements change.

As temperatures decline, a new reflective hoodie is introduced, offering a stylish solution for layering during fall. Coupled with a hot beverage, it provides an opportunity for warmth and introspection on personal achievements throughout the year.

The fifth annual "Game Off" game jam, hosted by GitHub, has commenced with the theme "throwback," inviting participants to create games inspired by nostalgia, retro elements, or ancestral characteristics. Participants can work individually or in teams to develop their games using open-source software, with submissions due by December 1 at 13:37 PDT. Games are to be submitted via itch.io, and voting, open to all participants, will follow the event's conclusion. GitHub supports newcomers with resources on Git, GitHub, and version control, while the itch.io community offers a platform for sharing tips and progress. The event encourages creativity and collaboration, with highlighted games to be featured on the GitHub Blog.

GitHub's Community Forum provides a new platform for developers to connect, ask questions, share ideas, and find support from a global community of 24 million developers, as well as GitHub staff. The forum is designed to enhance collaboration and learning by offering how-to articles, tips, and tricks for improving workflow and managing open-source communities. Participants are encouraged to contribute to discussions, with increased participation leading to higher recognition within the community. The platform is in its early stages, and feedback from users will be instrumental in its growth and the introduction of new features throughout 2018.