GitHub Action Hero: Swechhya Bista

GitHub Actions gives you the power to automate your workflow. Connect with the tools you know and love. Have more freedom to innovate and be creative. Deploy to any cloud, build containers, automate messages, and lots more. It’s time to take control.

There’s lots of amazing Actions being built every day. We spoke to some of the coolest developers building the latest workflows and automations. Last week, we shared Samson’s story. This week we have Swechhya Bista. She also participated in our recent GitHub Actions Hackathon. Read her story for inspiration, lessons, and why developers choose to build.

Getting Started with GitHub Actions

Swechhya, like many developers, started with a need. For her, it was the R language. R is mainly used by mathematicians, statisticians, and data scientists. This is due to its analytical capabilities and heavy slant towards stats and numbers. Swechhya built her own R package, but wanted more from it. She wanted her package to be automated. For it to run checks without her having to be there. This is where the power of GitHub Actions comes into play:

After building my own R package I wanted to automate the build checks and code coverage. For that I had to make external accounts in two different services. With the help of GitHub Actions I was could do all the checks without any external accounts.

It seemed so easy to setup, and too good to be true! This easy-to-use Action allowed Swechhya to build and check her R package excelR. Going back to a need, Swechhya understood she needed this capability from R. She needed checks to run automatically. After searching through the GitHub Markeplace, she did not find what she was looking for. So she built it! That’s when R Action was born.

So easy to use

One of the best things about GitHub Actions, is how easy it is to get started. This is Swechhya’s favourite feature:

It’s has easy integration with code repositories without use of any external accounts.

But all good things have challenges. Swechhya said her biggest challenge was testing the Action to find all the bugs in the code. But if bugs don’t scare you, then you’re good to go!

Swechhya is planning on building more Actions too. She’s started building a GitHub Action to check code coverage. This will certainly help when testing your code and finding those pesky bugs. Keep an eye out for more of these new Actions over on the GitHub Marketplace. You can also star Swechhya’s profile to stay up to date on what she’s working on. Just look at all those pretty contributions!

Learn to build today

We hope you enjoyed our short inspirational interview with Swechhya Bista. As she said, GitHub Actions is so easy to get started. Head on over to our Learning Lab course to learn the basics. You can also find R- Action, and hundreds of other GitHub Actions on the GitHub Marketplace.

If you liked Swechhya’s story, make sure you read up on all our awesome Action Heroes like Nikita, Victoria, and other amazing developers.

Written by

Michelle Duke

@MishManners

I'm a Content Producer working in tech & innovation. Known as the “Hackathon Queen” 👑 I'm on the GitHub DevRel team and love sharing stories from our amazing community of developers.