September 2018 Summaries

Join the celebration of Hacktoberfest’s 5th anniversary at the GitHub office in Amsterdam on October 2, from 19:00 to 22:00, featuring food, drinks, and learning opportunities for both new and experienced contributors to open source. Attendees will enjoy presentations from local open source maintainers, learn how to contribute to open source, and make pull requests, with plenty of support from experienced mentors, including GitHub’s @DEGoodmanWilson and Phusion’s @floord. The event promises an engaging evening filled with snacks, stickers, and the chance to hack on favorite projects while fostering a collaborative community spirit. If unable to attend, enthusiasts are encouraged to join or organize similar events globally, with numerous events already happening in cities like Bangkok, Bhubaneswar, and Luxembourg, supported by resources available through the Hacktoberfest Event Kit.

GitHub's upgrade of its main application from Rails 3.2 to Rails 5.2 was a significant achievement that took a year and a half, primarily due to the complexity of the task and the age of the codebase. The process involved careful planning, dual booting with multiple Rails versions, and iterative testing to ensure minimal disruption to users. Key lessons learned included the importance of upgrading early and often, addressing technical debt, and leveraging upstream tools rather than custom solutions. The successful completion of the upgrade not only improved the codebase's health but also allowed GitHub to contribute more to the Rails community, demonstrating the benefits of staying current with software updates.

GitHub HQ in San Francisco celebrated the 5th anniversary of Hacktoberfest on October 1, 2018, with an evening event featuring food, drinks, and opportunities for learning and networking. The event included a workshop on contributing to open source, along with demos and lightning talks from notable speakers like Gatsby creator Kyle Mathews, Electron engineer @codebytere, and Apollo GraphQL engineer Michael Watson. Attendees were encouraged to register via Eventbrite, and those unable to attend were invited to find or organize similar events globally, with Hacktoberfest activities occurring in various cities worldwide.

GitHub Apps have become a vital tool for developers looking to build integrations within GitHub, offering flexibility through GitHub's REST and GraphQL APIs. Code Climate's transition to GitHub Apps exemplifies how this technology can enhance functionality, particularly in managing server-to-server integrations, building bots, and providing granular permission scopes, which was previously limited with OAuth. The transition was facilitated by GitHub Apps' ability to maintain existing API endpoints and queries, requiring only changes in authentication methods. This switch also highlighted the importance of understanding GitHub Apps' different rate-limiting mechanisms compared to OAuth, as they are organization-wide but scale with the size of the organization. Additionally, the move to GitHub Apps impacted the user onboarding process, requiring users to install the application on GitHub, which was addressed by utilizing GitHub App installation endpoints to track progress. Code Climate views GitHub Apps as a robust platform for future development and collaboration with GitHub, particularly in exploring new features and data-driven engineering management.

GitHub Universe 2018 is set to take place at the historic Palace of Fine Arts, offering a diverse range of sessions and workshops designed to cater to developers, business leaders, and platform enablers. Participants can customize their experience by choosing from three main tracks: Developer Experience, Scaling Your Business, and Enabling Your Platform. Highlights include technical workshops, interactive sessions, and insights from industry leaders, such as Uber, Mozilla, Salesforce, and Walmart, focusing on cutting-edge technologies, code management, and strategies for business growth and platform optimization. The event underscores the significance of community contributions to the future of software development and provides an opportunity to learn from and collaborate with peers. Attendees can also extend their learning with a dedicated Workshop Day, featuring targeted sessions on open source, robotics, and Git expertise. With limited tickets available, the event promises a unique and personalized experience for all participants.

GitHub Classroom is a valuable tool for educators, offering a streamlined way to integrate GitHub into their courses by automatically creating student repositories and enabling assignment tracking directly from a dashboard. This platform has been embraced by institutions such as Loyola Marymount, Cal Poly, Rice University, and Johns Hopkins for its ability to incorporate real-world workflows into academic settings. Teachers appreciate its capacity to make GitHub accessible to beginners, as evidenced by the submission of over three million coding assignments. To address the challenge of managing numerous student repositories, the Classroom Assistant application simplifies the process by allowing educators to download multiple student assignments simultaneously to their local machines, thus saving time and enhancing focus on student interaction. The application is available across Windows, Mac, and Linux, further broadening its accessibility for educators.

Hacktoberfest, now in its fifth year, is a month-long event celebrating open source software, with DigitalOcean returning as a partner and Twilio joining for the first time. Participants can earn a limited-edition shirt by submitting five pull requests to open source projects between October 1-31, with the first 50,000 successful participants receiving the prize. Last year saw over 30,000 participants from 119 countries, contributing nearly 240,000 pull requests ranging from documentation improvements to new features. Those new to open source can refer to a dedicated guide, and participants are encouraged to share their experiences on social media using #hacktoberfest. More details, including terms and conditions, are available on the Hacktoberfest website.

GitHub is enhancing software development productivity by making it inclusive and accessible through research in machine learning, design, and infrastructure, aiming to develop advanced developer tools and workflows. Acknowledging that research outcomes often take time to reach users, GitHub has created "Experiments," a collection showcasing their most exciting research projects. The first of these is Semantic Code Search, which utilizes machine learning to enable code searches based on intent through natural language, rather than simple keyword matching. This initiative not only offers insights into GitHub's research but also encourages innovative thinking about the future of software development.

GitHub is advancing the field of semantic code search by leveraging deep learning to improve the discoverability of code beyond traditional keyword searches. By developing machine learning models that represent code and text within a shared vector space, GitHub aims to facilitate more intuitive searches where even non-matching keywords can yield relevant results. The approach involves training sequence-to-sequence models to create code summaries and fine-tuning these models to align code representations with textual descriptions. This semantic search capability could significantly enhance onboarding processes for new developers and improve code accessibility. Although the current implementation demonstrates the potential of semantic search within a limited dataset, ongoing research is focused on expanding its scope and refining its components, such as data preparation, model architecture, and evaluation methods. GitHub's efforts are part of a broader initiative to explore new use cases, including multilingual code searches, and they are inviting collaboration from interested researchers and developers.

The GitHub Student Developer Pack has introduced new tools to enhance project development for students, offering them for free to facilitate a productive start to the school year. Algolia provides a powerful search functionality API, offering 100,000 records and one million monthly indexing operations without charge, allowing developers to enhance their app's discoverability. GitKraken Glo offers a task tracking solution, syncing in real-time with GitHub Issues to manage class assignments and group projects efficiently, with a free one-year subscription. Heroku, a platform as a service, supports web application development with its cloud-based environment, offering a Hobby Dyno for small projects for up to two years, enabling students to focus on development rather than DevOps. Additionally, JetBrains offers a suite of integrated development environments for various programming languages, granting students a free year-long subscription to all its desktop tools and the option to renew the license for free as long as they are students.

The EU Parliament recently voted on the Copyright Directive, which imposes liability on content-sharing platforms for user-uploaded copyrighted content, potentially necessitating the use of upload filters, while exempting open source software development platforms like GitHub. However, the directive's narrow exemption for only "non-for-profit" platforms has raised concerns within the software development community, as many open source projects operate on commercial platforms. The directive also introduces a new licensing right for press publishers and restricts text and data mining to non-profit research institutions, unless individual EU countries adopt broader exceptions. This patchwork of regulations could complicate compliance for developers, particularly those involved in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The directive now moves to negotiations between the Parliament, Council, and Commission, with ongoing advocacy efforts aimed at ensuring that all open source software development platforms are excluded from filtering obligations. The broader aim is to reform copyright law to better align with the modern digital landscape without inadvertently hindering software development and its economic impact.

GitHub has announced an enhanced Premium Support program to cater to the diverse needs of its users, especially those requiring continuous support. The program now includes two plans: Premium and Premium Plus. Both plans offer features such as 24/7 web and phone support, priority ticket handling, guaranteed initial response times, access to premium content, and scheduled health checks. The Premium Plus plan offers additional benefits, including a dedicated Technical Support Account Manager, monthly administrative support hours, and a virtual training class on Git and GitHub best practices. These enhancements aim to provide comprehensive support and peace of mind to GitHub users, especially teams that require around-the-clock assistance.

GitHub offers a 10-week paid internship program during the summer of 2019 at their headquarters in San Francisco, welcoming students from various educational backgrounds, including international students. The internship provides an opportunity to work on real projects alongside experienced GitHub employees, known as Hubbers, and offers a collaborative and supportive environment. Past interns, such as Srinjoy and Bex, have worked on projects like GitHub Classroom and the open-source framework Probot, respectively, while also engaging in activities like writing blog posts and conducting workshops. The program is highly praised for its enthusiastic culture and unique perks such as having dogs in the office. Applications for the 2019 internship program can be submitted directly through GitHub's website, with options to receive updates on future opportunities.

GitHub's latest Diversity Report highlights the company's ongoing efforts and progress in diversity, inclusion, and belonging, emphasizing the expansion and deepening of data analysis regarding its distributed workforce and upward mobility. The report notes improvements such as an equal promotion rate among women and men, an increase in black leadership, and the establishment of the Employee Experience and Engagement department. However, it also acknowledges challenges, including a decrease in the percentage of women and underrepresented minorities. GitHub has launched employee resource groups like the Blacktocats and plans to introduce initiatives such as an apprenticeship program and partnerships with tech organizations to foster diversity. These efforts reflect GitHub's dedication to building a diverse and inclusive environment that mirrors the global community and enhances innovation.

GitHub Desktop's 1.4 release focuses on improving collaboration by introducing features that provide users with preemptive information about potential merge conflicts, making the merging process more informed and reducing surprises. This update builds on previous versions by notifying users of changes in the master branch and allowing easy integration of these changes. The new conflict detection feature aims to alleviate frustration associated with merging by indicating if a merge will result in conflicts and estimating the effort required to resolve them. The update also incorporates release notes directly into the app to keep users informed about changes and acknowledge contributors. Future releases promise further enhancements to make GitHub Desktop an even more valuable tool for team collaboration.

Git 2.19 has been released with contributions from over 60 developers, introducing several notable features and improvements. A key addition is the git range-diff tool, which allows users to compare sequences of commits, including their order and content changes, enhancing the visualization of commit differences during a rebase. The update also brings new functionalities to git grep, such as the ability to locate the first matching column and the -o option for extracting only matching parts of a search. Users can now set default branch sorting orders with the branch.sort config, and directory rename detection during merges has been improved. Additionally, Git has enhanced its handling of text encodings with the working-tree-encoding attribute and introduced configuration improvements like checkout.defaultRemote to resolve branch ambiguities. The release addresses a remote code execution vulnerability, updates command-line option completions, and expands gpg signing to work with X.509 certificates. Moreover, Git is working on significant developments such as partial clones, commit graphs, a new protocol version for fetching, and transitioning from SHA-1 to SHA-256 to enhance security and performance.

GitHub has partnered with Microsoft to integrate Azure Pipelines into GitHub, facilitating a seamless developer experience by enabling continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) across various platforms. This service, now available in the GitHub Marketplace, allows developers to configure CI/CD pipelines for Azure applications using their preferred languages and frameworks, automatically triggering builds and deployments with repository changes. Azure Pipelines supports multiple platforms, including cloud providers like Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, and offers built-in tasks for Kubernetes and serverless deployments. It is free for open-source projects, offering unlimited build minutes and up to 10 parallel Microsoft-hosted build jobs. GitHub's Chief Operating Officer, Kyle Daigle, emphasizes the importance of accessible tools and an open ecosystem, drawing on his extensive experience in scaling GitHub's engineering teams and fostering its AI integration strategy.

The European Parliament's impending vote on amendments to the EU Copyright Directive poses significant implications for open source, European competitiveness, and software development, prompting calls for developers in the EU to engage with their Members of European Parliament (MEPs) to emphasize the importance of open source. Key issues include potential requirements for upload filters and a "link tax," both of which could impact software development and internet openness. A recent event in San Francisco gathered representatives from organizations like HackerOne, Wikimedia, Reddit, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to discuss the directive's potential effects and emphasize the need for copyright reform that aligns with the digital age. Various amendments, such as those proposed by MEP Schaake and the IMCO/LIBE committee, aim to protect software development by establishing exceptions for text and data mining and opposing the link tax. The document encourages developers to advocate for these concerns with their MEPs before the vote and highlights the need for copyright reform that acknowledges the digital realities of modern software development.

GitHub recently completed the transition of removing jQuery from its frontend code, a process that took several years. Initially, jQuery was essential for GitHub due to the lack of standard browser APIs for tasks like DOM manipulation and AJAX requests, which allowed rapid prototyping and cross-browser compatibility. However, as web standards evolved, native browser features began to offer equivalent functionality, prompting GitHub to gradually replace jQuery with standard APIs. This transition was managed by setting metrics, discouraging new jQuery code, and using tools like eslint and static type checking with Flow to ensure code quality and maintainability. The transition not only improved code resilience but also reduced page load times by dropping a 30 kB dependency. Additionally, GitHub adopted modern web technologies like Custom Elements and progressive enhancement to continue building interactive and accessible web features. Despite the challenges, the incremental approach allowed GitHub to carefully phase out jQuery without disrupting site functionality, resulting in a cleaner and more efficient codebase.

Atom's GitHub package has introduced a new way to interact with pull requests, enhancing user experience through improvements such as a pull request list view and hover card functionality. Users can now view recent pull requests directly in Atom, with detailed information like author's avatar, pull request title, number, CI status, and more, replicating a conversation view similar to GitHub.com. The package also allows users to create new pull requests from within Atom, starting from the master branch, and includes a streamlined process to make changes, stage, commit, and publish changes. Emoji support has been added to commit messages, making the experience more engaging. The development team is focused on understanding user behavior and improving the package through usability studies and enhanced metric gathering, encouraging users to opt-in for telemetry to help refine features.