At 9:30am Wednesday, San Francisco time, one thousand sweaty nerds (sorry, ‘Hubbers’) sat entranced as speaker after speaker spoke about new developments in the world of GitHub. In a refreshing change from hearing an hour (or more) from the CEO, this event started with a very brief presentation from that person, but followed with half a dozen actual ‘shop floor’ workers who had intimate knowledge of the features they were presenting to us.

The company has long since moved on from being a simple code repository and is now very much a complete development platform. With that in mind, these were the announcement highlights.

GitHub Copilot is an AI programming assistant that uses an OpenAI Codex to suggest code and entire functions in real time, from within your code editor. AI will soon be integrated into every aspect of the developer experience–and, therefore GitHub Copilot will be accessible to everyone. Coming soon, businesses can purchase and manage seat licenses for GitHub Copilot for their employees.

Not only does Copilot improve development speed, but the end-resulting code is cleaner and better written. GitHub ran a survey to test this. They found that a Copilot task offered to a sample group of developers was completed in 44% of the time taken by a control group. Further both satisfaction and frustration levels were both improved. In addition, a general consensus amongst the executives that iTWire spoke with agreed that the resultant code was cleaner, contained fewer (if any) bugs and was most likely more robust from a security perspective. Currently, GitHub is managing a wait list in order to slowly ramp up the product.

‘Hey, Github!’ enables voice-based interaction with GitHub Copilot and many other parts of the GitHub ecosystem. Using voice only, Hey GitHub offers the potential to bring the benefits of GitHub Copilot to even more developers, including developers who have difficulty typing using their hands. ‘Hey, GitHub!’ only reduces the need for a keyboard when coding within VS Code for now, but it is intended to expand its capabilities through further research and testing. Hey, GitHub! is an experiment by the team in GitHub Next, and they'd love to get feedback. Sign up to join the wait list.

In discussing this with iTWire, CEO Thomas Dohmke mentioned that not only does this make life so much easier for those with a permanent handicap, but also for those of us with a temporary injury - perhaps a broken wrist from a skateboard accident – it’s always difficult to type with one hand!

Codespaces is now available to individual GitHub users (Free and Pro) and includes up to 60 hours of Codespaces for free every month. The number of hours is CPU dependent and the default is based on a 2 CPU virtual environment.

Codespaces provides an on-demand cloud development environment so developers can immediately start building any project. Last year, Codespaces was made available to GitHub Team and Enterprise Cloud customers and it quickly became obvious how Codespaces reduced the time it takes to onboard new developers and improve the developer workflow. However this problem still exists for developers and maintainers of open source projects. By removing the complexity of managing a dev environment and having to own a powerful machine, it is intended that the developers on the world, can create, collaborate, and innovate from the cloud.

Through a partnership with JetBrains, developers can now use the IDE of their choice on Codespaces. JupyterLab is also available in Codespaces (in public beta), so that machine learning and data scientists can get the full IDE experience. JupyterLab support is even more powerful when combined with GPU-powered codespaces. GPU access is in private preview; you can request early access here. 

LinkedIn Learning has 50+ Codespaces enabled courses that cover six programming languages and topics including data science and machine learning. These courses are available without charge until February 2023.

Roadmap is the planning tool that you need to keep your projects on track, whether your team is one or 1,000 strong. It allows you to keep an eye on the timing and progress of any project and share it with anyone. Roadmap provides the next level visualisation. Alongside tables and boards, a roadmap may be created to visualise work items across a timespan, plan and track a body of work over time, or watch the progress towards a deadline. With the full picture of timing and progress, communication with all stakeholders is simple. Anyone can check roadblocks to learn what’s stopping any activity and possibly pitch in to get a task moving.

A checklist is just fine, but sometimes it’s necessary to break things down a little more. The new Tasklists UI shows meta-data-like assignees and labels, and allows work to quickly be decomposed into sub-tasks, then convert them to GitHub Issues with a click. Tasklists are deeply integrated with GitHub Projects, and it is easy to use new fields like “tracked by” and “tracks” to get a birds-eye-view across all parent and child issues. And, under the hood, it’s all just Markdown.

Roadmap and Tasklists will be available soon. Sign up on the waitlist to try them out when they are ready. Projects is also available as a mobile app, “GitHub mobile.”

GitHub Enterprise Server 3.7, with 70 new features, is generally available for those who want to self-host the power of GitHub.

New features, include the security overview dashboard, which is now available to all enterprise customers, and support for nesting reusable GitHub Actions workflows.

New enterprise innersource policies also make it easier to collaborate across teams in any company, including the ability to restrict repositories to organisations only, and allow multiple forks of a repository within a single organisation.

A free trial is available here. 

GitHub Accelerator will provide stipends and mentorship for 20 maintainers and teams to launch full-time open source careers.

We are booting up a new way for us at GitHub to directly support, mentor, and grow the maintainers of projects we depend on. Our GitHub Accelerator will fund 20 maintainers and teams that want to commit to open source careers with a full stipend and mentorship, allowing them to turn their current open source side gig into a full-time career or company. This work will include a specific focus on building enterprise funders through GitHub Sponsors. Apply now, before the December 31, 2022, deadline.

GitHub Fund is a new $10 million fund, created in partnership with M12, to ensure that open source continues to get the funding it needs. The company sees the need to fund the open source companies of the future, too. Because if we want open source to be vibrant tomorrow, we need to invest in the developers and maintainers of today.

GitHub Sponsors will let project owners support their dependencies all at once, by uploading a list of maintainers they want to support plus the amounts of the sponsorships. GitHub Sponsors allows investment in the open source projects these owners depend on. This past summer, Github contributed half a million dollars to 900 of the dependencies that GitHub needs to run their own software, impacting developers across the world and allowing them to spend more time on open source: fixing lingering bugs, onboarding new contributors, patching security flaws, or sketching out the next iteration of their project. This would have been quite tedious in the past, but the new bulk sponsorship feature dramatically simplified the task.

Instead of checking out one by one for each sponsorship, sponsors will be able to upload a list of maintainers and dollar amounts and checkout with them all in one go. The goal is for these three programs–GitHub Accelerator, GitHub Fund, and GitHub Sponsors to continue to enable a thriving open source economy for projects that can be both a developer’s livelihood AND their passion project.

These were just some ;of the announcements made. Hore to follow as the conference continues.

The author travelled to GitHub Universe as a guest of the company.