Engineering

Over the course of a year, GitHub’s engineers make millions of commits across all of our internal repositories, process billions of API requests, and run tens of thousands of deployments across the internal apps that power GitHub’s services. We use many of GitHub’s products and plenty of other open source tools to operate at this scale. Here’s an inside look into how we do it.

Architecture & optimization

Improving Git push times through faster server side hooks

The history of pre-receive hooks, how we discovered that the performance was problematic, and how we went about safely replacing them.

Architecture & optimization

Performance at GitHub: deferring stats with rack.after_reply

How we sped up GitHub.com by moving slow, non-critical code into rack.after_reply.

Engineering

4 ways we use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

From automating builds and releases to taking care of large-scale regression testing, here are a few ways we use GitHub Actions to build GitHub.

Engineering

How we ship GitHub Mobile every week

Learn how the GitHub Mobile Team automates their release process with GitHub Actions.

Engineering

Technical interviews via Codespaces

Codespaces is a great tool for technical hiring exercises and helps level the playing field for candidates.

Architecture & optimization

A brief history of code search at GitHub

This blog post tells the story of why we built a new search engine optimized for code.

Architecture & optimization

Improving GitHub code search

Today, we are rolling out a technology preview for GitHub code search, the next iteration for search, discovery, and navigation on GitHub.

Engineering

Using ChatOps to help Actions on-call engineers

You can multiply the impact of your domain experts by building their common workflows into ChatOps.

Engineering

Partitioning GitHub’s relational databases to handle scale

In 2019, to meet GitHub’s growth and availability challenges, we set a plan in motion to improve our tooling and ability to partition relational databases.

Engineering

GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces

Over the past months, we’ve left our macOS model behind and moved to Codespaces for the majority of GitHub.com development.

Engineering

Why (and how) GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

Over the years, GitHub engineers have developed many ways to observe how our systems behave. We mostly make use of statsd for metrics, the syslog format for plain text logs…

Engineering

Security keys are now supported for SSH Git operations

GitHub has been at the forefront of security key adoption for many years. We were an early adopter of Universal 2nd Factor (“U2F”) and were also one of the first…

Architecture & optimization

How we use Web Components at GitHub

At GitHub, we pride ourselves on delivering a first-class developer experience. A considerable part of our work is on our front end, which we strive to keep as lightweight, fast,…

Engineering

How we use GitHub Actions to manage GitHub Docs

👋 Hello from the GitHub Docs team! We build everything you see at docs.github.com. Over the past year, we’ve written a bunch of GitHub Actions workflows to do some fun…

Engineering

How we ship code faster and safer with feature flags

At GitHub, we’re continually working to improve existing features and shipping new ones all the time. From our launch of GitHub Discussions to the release of manual approvals for GitHub…