After releasing the Octoverse, recently, GitHub conducted its conference known as GitHub Universe 2019 in San Francisco, CA. This year, the largest repository hosting service made some of the major announcements for the developer’s community.
Besides the announcements from the GitHub product leaders, the conference includes talks with open source maintainers to executive panels with innovative companies like Shopify, Zapier, and Ford.
GitHub Universe 2019 is a two-day conference where a developer can learn from the session tracks, which are focused on tools for enterprises, maintainers, integrators, and developers. This helps in acquiring knowledge about new products that are being launched by the product leaders.
In this article, we discussed some of the significant announcements as mentioned below.
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions was launched in beta during the GitHub Universe 2018. GitHub Actions is a community-led approach to software automation. This year, the leaders announced the general availability of Actions that makes it easy to automate all the software workflows with CI/CD. With this feature, a developer can build, test, and deploy code right from GitHub as well as make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging.
GitHub Packages
GitHub Packages was introduced in May this year. It is a software package hosting service, which allows a developer to host software packages privately or publicly and use those as dependencies in your projects. Since its release, more than 30,000 unique packages have been uploaded by developers in the beta version. One can also integrate GitHub Packages with GitHub APIs, GitHub Actions, and webhooks to create an end-to-end DevOps workflow that includes the code, CI, and deployment solutions.
GitHub for Mobile
GitHub for Mobile is an application that has been made available in beta for iOS. This will enable developers to review code and merge changes from anywhere. As a native app, GitHub for mobile automatically adapts to every screen size, supports in dark mode based on the device preferences. The idea behind this feature is to bring collaboration tools on smaller and pocket-friendly devices with a different form factor. The beta version for Android is currently on the waiting list and will soon be released.
Notifications
This year, the product leaders announced the beta version of inbox experience into GitHub rather than pushing notification emails in order to help developers to filter the work and choose the one which is more important.
Code Navigation
GitHub introduces Code Navigation for developers in order to navigate their codes. Code navigation mainly consists of two features which are jump to the definition and find all references. Currently, it is available for all Ruby, Python, and Go repositories on GitHub.
Code Search and Code Review
At GitHub Universe 2019, the product leaders announced the introduction of a new search experience known as Code Search which will provide the exact results developers expect when they search code in their repositories.
With the Code Review feature, while requesting a team’s review on a pull request, a developer can now specify how many members of the team need to add their review, and code review assignment will assign them directly.
GitHub Archive Program
GitHub partnered with the Long Now Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Software Heritage Foundation, Arctic World Archive, Microsoft Research, the Bodleian Library, and Stanford Libraries to ensure the long-term preservation of the world’s open-source software through the GitHub Archive Program. The mission of the GitHub Archive Program is to preserve open-source software for future generations.
