GitHub’s top 10 blog posts of 2021

As the year winds down, the GitHub Blog is highlighting some of the incredible work from GitHub’s engineers, product teams, and security researchers during 2021. If you’re looking for inspiration as we head into the new year (or even just an excuse for some alone time), take a look at the top 10 posts published in 2021.

1. GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces. A look at how (and why) our engineers have moved to Codespaces for the majority of GitHub.com development.
2. Behind GitHub’s new authentication token format. A deep dive into a new format that keeps your tokens more secure.
3. Introducing GitHub Copilot: your AI pair programmer. In June, we launched the technical preview of GitHub Copilot. Here’s what all the excitement was about.
4. Open Source goes to Mars. We celebrated the flight of the Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, with a special badge for OSS contributors.
5. npm 7 is now generally available! npm 7, released in February, brought some significant performance improvements to the npm CLI.
6. Making GitHub’s new homepage fast and performant. Learn how the team behind the new GitHub homepage tackled a page full of product shots, animations, and video and made it still perform well.
7. Privilege escalation with polkit: how to get root on Linux with a seven-year-old bug. A comprehensive analysis of a polkit vulnerability from the GitHub Security Lab.
8. How we use Web Components at GitHub. Web Components help us keep GitHub’s front end as lightweight, fast, and accessible as possible.
9. Partitioning GitHub’s relational databases to handle scale. A look at how GitHub engineers addressed the scaling challenges posed by our database systems.
10. Improving GitHub code search. Learn about the technology preview for GitHub code search, which we announced in December.

Stick around! We’re excited for what 2022 has in store, and we hope you join us in the new year.

Written by

Becca Crockett

@rebcro