Mission Report: GitHub Universe

On September 14 in San Francisco, more than 1,500 developers helped us kick off GitHub Universe and share stories about open source, workplace best practices, and how the GitHub Community builds software. In case you missed it, here are some highlights, along with the new features and community updates announced:

We started day one with a keynote by GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath, who shared a few brand new developments from around the GitHub Universe. We were also joined by CEO of Black Girl’s Code Kimberly Bryant and White House Senior Technology Officer Alvand Salehi. For more details, check out the launch post.

On day two, we heard a keynote from GitHub’s VP Social Impact Nicole Sanchez, Dr. Kortney Ziegler, and David Molina of Operation Code who shared their thoughts on training new developers and expanding opportunities to participate in technology for people from all backgrounds

Code Review

Our new Reviews improves code review on GitHub and helps you share the weight of building software. Reviews allow you to comment on specific lines of code, formally “approve” or “request changes” to pull requests, and more. Our initial changes are only the first step of a much greater roadmap toward faster, friendlier code reviews.

Projects

With Projects, you can organize work from your GitHub repositories and integrate project management into your development cycle without skipping a beat (or even opening a new browser tab).

Although we’ll quickly add to Projects, our initial release currently supports:

• A New Projects tab–at the same level as Code, Issue, Pull Requests within a repository–that lists all of your projects
• Workflow columns that you can name and reorder
• Cards that you can drag and drop between columns pointing to issues, Pull Requests, or notes
• Tools built on top of Projects by some fantastic partners, including Waffle.io and ZenHub

Platform updates

We launched a few things to make integrating with GitHub a better, more enjoyable experience, including a public Platform Roadmap and the GitHub Platform Forum. We also launched two new projects to make our platform more flexible:

• Integrations Early Access: a new model that provides better ways for tools to extend and integrate with GitHub
• The GitHub GraphQL API Early Access: a GraphQL API that simplifies product development

Breakout sessions

Our breakout sessions this year covered everything from product updates and applications to building more diverse and inclusive engineering teams. All of the talks from the general sessions are ready for you to watch from home—and recordings of the Launch, Flight, and Orbit breakouts will be available soon.

Benefit concert

We ended Monday at The Masonic with the Big Bang—a benefit concert for Black Girls Code. Artist and actor COMMON headlined with support from Lion Babe. Head to www.blackgirlscode.com to learn more about BGC’s work and find out how you can help them reach their mission to teach one million girls to code.

Sponsors

GitHub Universe would not have been possible without the support of our sponsors, who provided food, juice, coffee, bubble tea, and beautiful art installations for our enjoyment.

Thank you

And finally, thank you to our community for making all of this possible—and helping GitHub Universe take flight.

Written by

Stephanie Wills

@stephbwills