GitHub’s top blog posts of 2023

As 2023 winds down, The GitHub Blog is highlighting your favorite posts of the year. These are the most-read and shared blogs of 2023. Not only did the incredible work from GitHub’s engineers, product teams, and security researchers draw lots of attention, but many of you spent time consuming how-to articles and guides, along with overviews of your favorite programming languages (hello, Rust). So grab a warm beverage, find a quiet corner for reading, and let’s take a look at some of the top posts published this year!

AI is everywhere

GitHub Copilot grew and evolved this year, and developers loved reading all about it. We shared several big announcements about your AI pair programmer and offered some guides to get you up to speed on LLMs and prompt engineering.

• Universe 2023: Copilot transforms GitHub into the AI-powered developer platform
  GitHub announced general availability of GitHub Copilot Chat and previews of the new GitHub Copilot Enterprise offering, new AI-powered security features, and the GitHub Copilot Partner Program.
• How to use GitHub Copilot: Prompts, tips, and use cases
  In this prompt guide for GitHub Copilot, GitHub developer advocate Michelle and former GitHub staff member Rizel share examples and best practices for communicating your desired results to the AI pair programmer.
• The architecture of today’s LLM applications
  Here’s everything you need to know to build your first LLM app and problem spaces you can start exploring today.
• A developer’s guide to prompt engineering and LLMs
  Prompt engineering is the art of communicating with a generative AI model. In this article, we’ll cover how we approach prompt engineering at GitHub, and how you can use it to build your own LLM-based application.

Making you more productive and secure

This year we also beefed up security and launched new productivity tools to supercharge your software development.

• Raising the bar for software security: GitHub 2FA begins March 13
  On March 13, we officially began rolling out our initiative to require all developers who contribute code on GitHub.com to enable one or more forms of two-factor authentication (2FA) by the end of 2023. Read on to learn about what the process entails and how you can help secure the software supply chain with 2FA.
• Announcing the GitHub Actions extension for VS Code
  We announced the release of the public beta of the official GitHub Actions VS Code extension, which provides support for authoring and editing workflows and helps you manage workflow runs without leaving your IDE.
• GitHub merge queue is generally available
  Supercharge pull request merges on your busiest branches by enabling your team to queue.

How GitHub builds GitHub

Alongside everything new and improved that we announced, we also shared glimpses behind the scenes into how our engineering teams build the products that you use every day. Find out how we deliver first-class tools and experiences internally to our own developers and externally to everyone who uses GitHub around the world.

• The technology behind GitHub’s new code search
  A look at what went into building the world’s largest public code search index.
• Building GitHub with Ruby and Rails
  Since the beginning, GitHub.com has been a Ruby on Rails monolith. Today, the application is nearly two million lines of code and more than 1,000 engineers collaborate on it daily.
• Upgrading GitHub.com to MySQL 8.0
  GitHub uses MySQL to store vast amounts of relational data. This is the story of how we seamlessly upgraded our production fleet to MySQL 8.0.

The programming languages you love

In our annual Octoverse report, we studied how open source activity around AI, the cloud, and Git are changing the developer experience. One takeaway? You love programming in Python and Rust.

• Why Python keeps growing, explained
  A deep dive into why more people are using Python than ever, its key use cases, and why it’s still so popular 30-plus years after it was first released.
• Why Rust is the most admired language among developers
  Rust continues to top the charts as the most admired and desired language by developers, and in this post, we dive a little deeper into how (and why) Rust is stealing the hearts of developers around the world.

Check back in 2024 to learn more about software development and what GitHub is doing to help you grow and build!