GitHub Octoverse 2021: Developer diversity is increasing, code is shipping faster than ever

The 2021 edition of GitHub’s annual Octoverse report highlights a welcome increase in the diversity of the developer community alongside many other interesting trends.

According to the report, almost 60 percent of active GitHub users are now distributed outside North America. The world’s largest repo service is seeing the fastest user growth in Indonesia, Brazil, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Canada, the UK, and China.

Developers are both writing and shipping code...

16 November 2021 | Git

Thomas Dohmke will be GitHub’s new CEO

Thomas Dohmke is taking over from Nat Friedman to become GitHub’s new CEO.

Dohmke co-founded HockeyApp – a service to help distribute beta versions of apps and get analytics and crash reports – in 2011, to solve some of his paint points as a developer.

He took this passion for solving pain points to GitHub in 2018 after leading Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub alongside Friedman.

In a blog post, Dohmke wrote:

“Leading the home for all...

3 November 2021 | Databases

Linus Torvalds: GitHub creates ‘absolutely useless garbage’ merges

Linux and Git creator Linus Torvalds has criticised GitHub for creating “absolutely useless garbage merges”.

Torvalds’ comment can be viewed in an archive of a Linux development mailing list and was directed at Konstantin Komarov, Founder and CEO of Paragon Software, about the submission of its read-write NTFS driver for the upcoming 5.15 kernel.

“github creates absolutely useless garbage merges, and you should never ever use the github interfaces to merge...

8 September 2021 | Git

GitHub Discussions exits beta to help boost developer communities

GitHub’s collaboration-driving feature Discussions is exiting beta to help developer communities thrive.

Discussions enable developers to make repos fun, collaborative, and engaging spaces with features like the ability to pin big announcements, label discussions, mark the most helpful answers, personalise categories, and respond on-the-go via mobile.

Later this year, GitHub will be adding two more features:

Ask your community with polls. With the new Polls...

18 August 2021 | Git

Stanford Law and GitHub launch initiative to protect open-source developers

Stanford Law and GitHub are partnering on an initiative to protect the legal rights of open-source developers.

Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from 1998 prohibits the circumvention of technological measures employed by, or on behalf of, copyright owners to protect access to their works.

Open-source developers regularly face takedown claims under Section 1201 but, rather than fight it, they often decide to avoid the cost and risk by just removing the...

27 July 2021 | Git

GitHub brings its suite of supply chain security features to Go

Go is receiving a boost from GitHub with the company bringing its supply chain security features to the Google-designed language.

According to GitHut, Go is currently the fourth most-popular language on GitHub. The Go community embraced GitHub and now the company is returning the favour by helping them to discover, report, and prevent security vulnerabilities.

Steve Francia, Product Lead of Go Language at Google, said:

“Go was created, in part, to address the...

23 July 2021 | Git

Former NSA executive Jacob DePriest now heads GitHub’s security operations

GitHub has announced that former NSA (National Security Agency) senior executive Jacob DePriest is now heading its security operations.

Open source evangelist DePriest built the NSA’s Developer Experience from scratch and helped the agency’s developers contribute to the work of others. The NSA’s historically lengthy approval process was reduced from weeks to mere hours in some cases.

A 2019 post on the US Intelligence Careers website explains why DePriest has a...

21 July 2021 | Git

GitLab: 2020 was a ‘catalyst for DevOps maturation’

GitLab’s fifth annual DevSecOps survey reveals that last year was pivotal for the maturation of DevOps.

The only silver lining from the disaster of a year that was 2020 is that it helped to highlight inefficiencies with legacy processes and technologies. As the world looks to "build back better" from the pandemic, the work of DevOps teams should provide some inspiration.

Eric Johnson, CTO at GitLab, said:

“This year’s Global DevSecOps Survey shows that...

5 May 2021 | Approaches

GitHub expands CLI functionality to bring Actions to your terminal

GitHub is expanding the functionality of its CLI (Command-Line Interface) tool to bring Actions to your terminal.

The first stable version of GitHub CLI launched in September last year with the aim of enabling developers to keep their repo workflows in their terminal.

“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,” Amanda Pinsker, Product Designer at GitHub, said...

16 April 2021 | Development Tools

GitHub’s secret scanning for private repos launches alongside security overview

GitHub has launched its secret scanning tool for private repositories alongside a new security overview dashboard.

The world’s largest repo host first unveiled the fraud-preventing secret scanning feature in May last year as part of GitHub Advanced Security—a package of features that includes code scanning, secret scanning, and dependency reviews.

Secret scanning has been in beta until today. Since it was first announced, GitHub says it has:

Expanded secret...

30 March 2021 | Development Tools