GitHub partners with Adobe and AmEx to expand its MLH Fellowship

GitHub has partnered with Adobe and American Express (AmEx) to deliver a significant expansion of its MLH Fellowship.

The world’s largest repo host first announced MLH Fellowship in May last year. As the world adapted to remote work, the fellowship aimed to give students the opportunities they need to succeed.

93 percent of fellows said that participation in the initiative gave them more confidence in making open-source contributions. On the other side of the equation,...

19 February 2021 | Git

GitHub ‘sincerely apologises’ to Jewish employee fired over Nazis remark

GitHub has issued a public apology directed at a Jewish employee who was fired after making remarks about Nazis.

Following the US Capitol attack from groups with known associations to Nazis and other white supremacists, the employee posted in an internal Slack channel: “Stay safe homies, Nazis are about."

A co-worker complained about the comment–-calling it “untasteful conduct” and not how to describe the rioters.

Speaking to TechCrunch under conditions...

18 January 2021 | Development Tools

GitHub is restored in Iran after US gov permits sanctions exemption

GitHub is fully-restored in Iran after the US government granted the Microsoft-owned firm an exception to sanctions.

“All developers should be free to use GitHub, no matter where they live,” wrote GitHub in a blog post.

“At the same time, GitHub respects and abides by US law, which means government sanctions have limited our ability to provide developers in some countries the full range of GitHub services.”

GitHub ceased most operations in North Korea,...

8 January 2021 | Git

Universe 2020: GitHub simplifies open-source investing, adds dark mode, and more

GitHub is announcing a new way for businesses to invest in open-source alongside other features on day one of its virtual Universe conference.

Businesses will now be able to show their support and appreciation for their favourite open-source projects via ‘GitHub Sponsors for Companies’.

The new feature enables companies to invest in open-source projects using their existing GitHub billing arrangements. Several high-profile businesses – including Amazon Web...

8 December 2020 | Git

State of the Octoverse 2020: Devs increase productivity despite pandemic

GitHub’s latest State of the Octoverse has been released, offering developer insights for a year which has been unlike any other.

Fortunately, software development is one industry which could adapt quickly to the unique circumstances brought about by the pandemic. Many developers already work remotely so, for some, minimal-to-no changes were required to their working habits during lockdowns.

56 million developers used GitHub in 2020—making over 1.9 billion...

2 December 2020 | Git

GitHub CLI 1.0 enables a full repo workflow from the terminal

GitHub CLI, a tool for bringing full repo functionality to your terminal, has reached its first stable version after a very successful beta.

“Developers spend a lot of time in their terminals, and our CLI helps to mitigate the frequent context switching between your terminal and GitHub.com,” says Amanda Pinsker, Product Designer at GitHub.

“Command-line tools enable developers to script nearly any action and automate their workflows, which in turn allows developers...

17 September 2020 | Git

GitHub preserves open source code in the Arctic (just in case…)

GitHub has completed its mission to preserve all of the repository’s open source code in the Arctic.

The code-hosting platform first announced the initiative last year as part of its Archive Program. The whole coronavirus thing set GitHub’s plans back a bit, but the company has now confirmed that the code was successfully deposited on July 8th.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzI9FNjXQ0o

A snapshot of all active public repositories was taken on February 2nd,...

20 July 2020 | Git

Amazon’s AI-powered code reviewer CodeGuru is now available

An artificial intelligence-powered code reviewer from Amazon Web Services (AWS) called CodeGuru has reached general availability.

CodeGuru is a set of tools which use machine learning for reviewing code and suggesting potential optimisations to improve performance.

The set consists of two components, Reviewer and Profiler, and first launched into preview last December.

AWS trained Reviewer using code from over 10,000 open source projects in addition to the...

30 June 2020 | Artificial Intelligence

GitHub will replace terms associated with slavery like ‘master’ and ‘whitelist’

GitHub has said it will remove terms associated with slavery like “master” and “whitelist” from its platform.

The world’s largest repository host has said it will drop terms like “master” and “slave” for more neutral terminology like “main/primary/default” and “secondary”.

Other terminology which will be replaced includes “whitelist” and “blacklist” in favour of the more general “allow list” and “deny/exclude list,”...

15 June 2020 | Git

GitHub warns Java developers about malware infecting NetBeans projects

GitHub has issued a warning to Java developers about malware which is specifically infecting NetBeans projects.

The security team for the world’s largest repository host has dubbed the malware Octopus Scanner and found “26 open source projects that were backdoored by this malware and that were actively serving backdoored code.”

GitHub notes the malware is designed to backdoor projects created using the Apache NetBeans IDE – a phenomenon they had not seen before...

1 June 2020 | Development Tools