Before your 2018 calendar fills up, start planning your trip to Barcelona on March 8 for Git Merge—an event dedicated to the developer community's favorite version control tool. Whether you're new to Git or built a company around it, you'll walk away with connections and ideas that can help you get to the next step. Tickets are on sale now, and we're taking Git Merge speaker submissions until January 20!

Speak at Git Merge

If you have a 30-minute session idea, we'd love to hear it. While Git Merge sessions are usually technical, we're looking for a wide range of topics and presenters—don't let a lack of technical (or speaking) experience stop you from submitting a proposal. If selected, you'll receive tickets to Git Merge events, and we'll help pay for your travel and accommodations.

Send us a proposal

Secure your spot

General admission tickets are on sale now for €99, and all proceeds will benefit the Software Freedom Conservancy. You can also add a ticket for our workshop day on March 7 until they sell out.

Get tickets

See what Git Merge is about in our 2017 recap video.

This month, we’re introducing a few new apps to help you write, manage, and deploy code. To see what's new and find more ways to work better, head to GitHub Marketplace.

Testing
TestQuality provides modern and powerful test plan management that's seamlessly integrated with GitHub. Test Management workflows are extended, so you can create, update, delete, and link defects and requirements in your repository without ever leaving your testing workflows. Best of all, TestQuality is completely free for use with public repositories on GitHub.

Project management
Issue.sh integrates natively with GitHub to provide agile project management with fine-grained permissions. The app includes issue boards, story points, finish time estimation, burndown charts, and more. Developers don't have to switch contexts, and project managers can get total visibility into the development process.

Publishing
Pageclip is a simple way to save form data from your website. Collect leads for your new product, set up a contact form, capture emails for a newsletter, or create white-labeled survey forms—all from your static website and without a server.

Security
BackHub creates daily recurring backups of all your public and private repositories, keeping an up-to-date backup with up to three months of snapshots. Backups include the repository and all metadata including the wikis, issues, and pull requests associated with it.

Deployment
Take care of your application instead of focusing on Capistrano and the asset pipeline. Cloud 66 for Rails provides everything you need to run production-ready Rails and Rack apps on any cloud and under your cloud account.

Continuous integration
Cloud 66 Skycap is a container-native CI/CD solution that allows you to build your image from source code in a reliable and repeatable way by taking code from your Git repository and running your Docker build workflow step-by-step. Skycap can also produce more than one image and comes with an intuitive interface and private Docker repository.

Ready to try out these new additions? See how they can help your team work better or discover even more tools in GitHub Marketplace.

Github Regional Sales Director Clay Nelson and MapBox’s Vice President of Business Development, Alex Barth explored how software development is evolving in the automotive space in a recent webcast.

With high consumer expectations, advances in software development, and new open source principles in highly-regulated industries, Barth says automotive companies must evolve or fall behind. Here are a few highlights from the webcast and a link to watch the full recording.

Watch the webcast

Growing consumer expectations

It's never been easier for consumers to interact with each other and the brands they care about, especially with social media platforms at their fingertips. That means automotive brands need to focus more than ever on acknowledging and meeting consumer expectations—even when they ask for the next wave of vehicles to be "smartphones on wheels". Coupled with the pressures of maintaining safety, quality, and security within code, these demands call for the adoption of open source principles and faster development.

New workflow complexities

In order to achieve the “rolling smartphone” effect, computing within vehicles is changing rapidly, from isolated micro-controllers to more integrated systems—and teams can no longer work in isolation. They're racing to deliver consumer-requested features that have more complexity and dependencies, which is especially challenging in a highly-regulated industry.

Accelerated collaborative development

With more modern workflows, such as the GitHub Flow, organizations can develop collaborative processes that allow for more visibility. This enables developers to communicate through code in a more straightforward (but still secure) way, rather than getting stuck in the same developmental bottleneck that has choked the industry for years.

To learn more about how GitHub works within the automotive industry, watch the webcast.

Watch more of our webcasts

2017 has been the year of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The advancements here will continue for years to come—but what can we expect in 2018? Data is on the rise, placing an even greater emphasis on security, cloud, and open source. Jason Warner, SVP of Technology, shares his predictions on the major technology trends for 2018.

Data will rule all

Over the last several years, Cloud 1.0 has been about computing in big clouds, while Cloud 2.0 is all about data. This includes data movement and the tools and services that support it, like analytics and machine learning systems. Today all companies are data companies, whether they know it or not. In 2018, so long as teams know how to use it, data will become their greatest asset.

The workflow war will heat up—and so will mergers and acquisitions (M&A)

The pressure is on for businesses to capture developers’ attention and expand the cloud ecosystem. Mergers and acquisitions will heat up as big tech companies snatch up smaller ones focusing on the developer experience, solving infrastructure problems, and building better workflow tools. At GitHub, we'll have a crucial role in integrating development platforms between these companies.

Open source will keep climbing the stack

A decade ago, Linux was a big deal. Now it’s standard. Back in the day, companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were forced to build their own, proprietary tools because no other software existed to meet their needs. Many of these frameworks have since been open sourced—and other open source technologies, like Kubernetes, are becoming integral to developers' workflows. This shift is changing what companies are investing in, making open source software traditional software's biggest competitor.

Infrastructure will have its Ruby on Rails moment

New tools will help developers get their ideas to production faster and save them time turning knobs under the hood. With applications taking some of the infrastructure burden off developers, they'll be free to focus on the stuff they care about most—building, growing, and evolving their projects and products.

Security will move into the spotlight, permanently

Security needs to be built into code development, not added in production. Many of the world’s critical systems still aren’t hardened enough—and their surface area is only getting bigger. The steady stream of malware attacks we saw this year will only become more frequent. As a result, we’ll start to see significantly more financial and development resources allocated to security. We’ll also see the rise of more intelligent systems, eventually culminating in a series of automatically secured layers.

Our free and open internet will be stress tested

The fragility of net neutrality and the rise of country-specific data localization laws will undoubtedly test the resilience not only of the internet—but also the fabric of global society and how businesses work together worldwide. 2018 will decide the future of net neutrality, and we'll feel the impact no matter the outcome. In the meantime, join us in the fight for net neutrality in the U.S. before the FCC votes on December 14.

Today’s software is increasingly interconnected and interdependent. There’s a good chance your project relies on someone else's, and if your project is public that others might rely on it, too. GitHub's new dependency graph gives you insight into the projects your code depends on and the projects that depend on your code.

Join GitHub Product Manager Miju Han and Trainer Matt Desmond to learn how to use your dependency graph to assess the security of your projects—and how to take action using suggested fixes. We’ll also discuss the future of security and the GitHub platform, including security alerts and additional language support. We'll also cover our approach to code security.

The webcast will take place December 19th at 12:30 pm PT. We hope to see you there!

Sign up

Home to over 80 million specimens from across the globe, the Natural History Museum is on a constant mission to make its collections more accessible by taking them from physical drawers to digital catalogs. To support their online collections, the Museum has developed specialized resources, like Inselect—a cross-platform, open source desktop application that automates how scientists digitize specimens. Using Inselect, researchers can crop images from whole-drawer scans, as well as similar images generated by digitizing museum collections.

Speeding up a creepy-crawly process

The museum initially developed Inselect for a simple purpose: to identify individual specimens from a drawer of samples in order to digitally categorize each. This isn’t a quick task—the Natural History Museum houses an estimated 33 million insect specimens in 130,000 drawers. Processed manually, it takes about an hour to categorize a drawer of specimens. Inselect, on the other hand, can do the same job in five to 10 minutes, depending on the complexity of the drawer.

Open source, open access

Despite its name, Inselect isn't just for insect specimens. Researchers and archivists can use the application for all sorts of projects that require cataloguing and categorizing for digital collections. In addition to working across a range of digital collections, Inselect operates on Windows and macOS under an open source license, allowing scientists and research institutes anywhere instant access rare specimens and providing a significant boost to the Natural History Museum’s digitization plans.

The Natural History Museum is by no means short of material to digitize. Researchers have adapted Inselect to look at slide digitization and have used to catalogue around 100,000 microscopic slides. The Digital Collections Programme at the museum is looking into digitizing more than just insects; they plan to make much larger artifacts such as fossils and skeletons available online, too. The scale of these artifacts, however, presents an entirely different challenge—but one that future open source software may well be able to solve.

By open sourcing Inselect, the Museum has provided a tool for other organizations to use, too. They've endorsed the Science International Open Data Accord and operate an open-by-default policy on their scientific collections. One result is the University of Sheffield’s project ‘Mark my bird’—a research project on the diversity of bird bills based on birds from their collection.

See Inselect in action

Two years ago, we breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed the Open Internet Order—regulations allowing people to freely access and interact with information online, and protecting them from potential discriminatory practices by internet service providers.

In 2016, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, also known as the D.C. Circuit, gave us additional comfort when it upheld the regulations despite a challenge from the telecommunications industry.

Unfortunately, things change. Now an effort to repeal the order is underway, and we’re asking our community to once again help us protect net neutrality and rally behind a free and open internet.

Join us in the fight for net neutrality

The latest challenge

Earlier this year, FCC chairperson Ajit Pai expressed his intentions to get rid of the 2015 order. We wrote about this in July and joined more than one thousand companies urging the commissioner to reconsider. Despite widespread outcry from individuals and organizations alike, last week Pai made good on his intentions and released his proposal.

In response, Pai’s colleague Commissioner Mignon Clyburn released a fact sheet explaining the proposal while Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel penned an op-ed urging the public to “make a ruckus” and essentially save the FCC from itself.

Net neutrality is an issue that transcends party lines. A recent Morning Consult and Politico Poll indicated that Republican and Democratic support for net neutrality rules is essentially the same, differing only by a couple of percentage points.

Why it matters

Net neutrality gives developers the freedom to build and ship software without being potentially blocked, throttled, or tolled by internet service providers. The result has been vast opportunity for developers. It's crucial that public policy support expands the opportunity to participate in the software revolution. Undermining net neutrality at a time of concern about consolidation and inequality is precisely the wrong move—directly harmful to developers’ ability to launch new products and eroding trust that the internet is a force for innovation and opportunity.

What you can do

On December 14, the FCC will vote on Pai’s proposal—and it’s expected to pass. Supporters of net neutrality are already gearing up for another court battle. In the meantime, the U.S. Congress could attempt a legislative fix.

As this discussion evolves and net neutrality is continuously challenged, it’s important that your congressperson knows where you stand. Let them know that you’re energized and that you continue to stand in solidarity with the majority of people who support robust, net neutrality protection.

Call your U.S. congressperson today and urge them to oppose efforts to roll back net neutrality.

Another Hacktoberfest has come and gone, and we couldn't be more proud of your contributions. With over 200,000 merged pull requests in almost 65,000 repositories, you made this our biggest Hacktoberfest yet. You worked hard, and with those special edition shirts—you looked good doing it. Congratulations!

From Berlin to Bangalore, almost 32,000 people worked on Hacktoberfest projects in more than 100 community-organized Hacktoberfest events.

Thank you

Thanks to all of the open source maintainers who prepared and merged issues for participants. You kept the projects flowing, and you were a big part of this event's success.

We also want to thank our friends at DigitalOcean for their support of the open source community, and for sponsoring this year's Hacktoberfest. This event wouldn't be possible without you.

What's next

You don’t have to wait until Hacktoberfest 2018 to work on your next open source project!

Searching for something to work on? Check out our redesigned Explore or "help wanted" projects.

Looking for your Hacktoberfest shirt? If you registered and completed four pull requests but haven't received an email about your shirt, reach out to hacktoberfest@digitalocean.com.

Just over a year ago Jekyll, the open source project that powers GitHub Pages, introduced shared themes. Since then, you've been able to use about a dozen themes to change the look and feel of your GitHub Pages site.

Starting today, you can use any of the hundreds of community-curated themes on GitHub.com. To build your site with any public, GitHub-hosted theme, add the following to your site's _config.yml file:

remote_theme: owner/name

Replacing owner and name with the repository's owner and name.

And if you're interested in making your Jekyll theme available to other users, simply follow the instructions for creating a Gem-based theme, and ensure the repository is public.

For more information, see the Jekyll theme documentation or get in touch.

24 Pull Requests is an annual community-organized event encouraging developers to give back to open source projects over the holiday season. Be part of this year's giving by submitting 24 pull requests between December 1 and December 24.

Last year, almost 3,000 developers gave the gift of code to over 6,000 different open source projects. And now, with the 24 Pull Requests web app, you can get information about the event, find projects that need your help, and even visualize your contributions in a calendar.

Whether it's fixing a bug or adding documentation, there are plenty of projects that could use your help! To give back, just sign in with your GitHub account on the 24 Pull Requests site and they'll help you track your contributions.

Give the gift of code

We welcome our robot overlords—or at least ones that fit conveniently on human-sized desks! Hubot, your friendly robot sidekick, is now in the GitHub Shop and ready to help you deploy into the future. Hubot may be made of metal (or vinyl in figurine form), but this six-inch robot is here to warm up the workspaces of developers everywhere this holiday season. And with the start of our Cyber Sale, you can get yours for less.

Find a Hubot for your home

Get 30% off all GitHub gear

This year, we’re extending our Cyber Sale to make sure you’ve got plenty of time to save on hoodies, stickers, and robots. Just use code GHSALE2017 at checkout to get 30% off your order, and free shipping on orders over $75, November 24-29.

Shop the Sale

Working together on software is so much more than writing code. Processes like planning, analysis, design, user research, documentation, and general project decision-making all play a part in the build process. Now there's a new way to talk through projects with your team.

Give every conversation a home (and a URL)

Team discussions provide your team and organization members a place to share information with each other. Gone are the days of having your issues cluttered with discussions or your pull requests flooded with lengthy conversations that aren’t related to your code changes. Team discussions give those conversations a home and a URL on GitHub, so they can be shared easily across the platform or saved to reference later.

Start discussions from your dashboard

To get started with team discussions, navigate to your dashboard while logged in and choose a team from the new "Your teams" section on the right sidebar. Then click on your team to go to the discussion view. From there you can start a new discussion or join in on an existing one.

Chat with your team in public or private

All organization members can see your discussion posts by default. Mark your post as private if you have something more sensitive to share. Only direct team members will have access to the private post and its replies.

Building on top of the nested teams functionality, notifications cascade from parent to children teams making it even easier to share important information throughout your organization.

Get updates on conversations you care about

Having trouble staying in the know about what other teams within your organization are working on? Watch a team that you're not a member of to stay up to date on their public discussion activity. If you’re worried about getting too many notifications, that's okay, too! You can always subscribe or unsubscribe to individual posts or decide to un-watch an entire team if the flow of information is too much.

Support for team discussions in the GitHub API v3 and v4 and GitHub Enterprise is coming soon—and stay tuned for even more features, and functionality. Our goal is to provide you with a place to organize your thoughts, discuss ideas, and work through your team's toughest problems on GitHub.

To learn more, check out the documentation!

Last month, we made it easier for you to keep track of the projects your code depends on with the dependency graph, currently supported in Javascript and Ruby. Today, for the over 75 percent of GitHub projects that have dependencies, we’re helping you do more than see those important projects. With your dependency graph enabled, we’ll now notify you when we detect a vulnerability in one of your dependencies and suggest known fixes from the GitHub community.

How to start using security alerts

Whether your projects are private or public, security alerts get vital vulnerability information to the right people on your team.

Enable your dependency graph

Public repositories will automatically have your dependency graph and security alerts enabled. For private repositories, you’ll need to opt in to security alerts in your repository settings or by allowing access in the Dependency graph section of your repository’s Insights tab.

Set notification preferences

When your dependency graph is enabled, admins will receive security alerts by default. Admins can also add teams or individuals as recipients for security alerts in the dependency graph settings.

Respond to alerts

When we notify you about a potential vulnerability, we’ll highlight any dependencies that we recommend updating. If a known safe version exists, we’ll select one using machine learning and publicly available data, and include it in our suggestion.

Vulnerability coverage

Vulnerabilities that have CVE IDs (publicly disclosed vulnerabilities from the National Vulnerability Database) will be included in security alerts. However, not all vulnerabilities have CVE IDs—even many publicly disclosed vulnerabilities don't have them. We'll continue to get better at identifying vulnerabilities as our security data grows. For more help managing security issues, check out our security partners in the GitHub Marketplace.

This is the next step in using the world’s largest collection of open source data to help you keep code safer and do your best work. The dependency graph and security alerts currently support Javascript and Ruby—with Python support coming in 2018.

Learn more about security alerts

Wilhelm Klopp is a student at University College London (UCL), a Campus Expert, and creator of Simple Poll—one of the most popular Slack integrations. He spent the summer of 2017 as a Developer Relations Intern on the GitHub Education team. In this post Wilhelm shares his work on GitHub Field Day over nine weeks at GitHub HQ in San Francisco.

Solving a problem for my own community

At UCL, our student community is vibrant and engaged, but after a few years, I noticed that we lacked a system for “knowledge transfer”, including a way for older leaders to train new students before they graduate. There are a few great resources out there to help solve this problem. Campus Experts, for example, is an online training community to enrich the technical community on your campus.

Personally, I was interested in developing an in-person event for student tech leaders—and GitHub Education was interested, too. For my internship, I proposed to start with a prototype event at GitHub HQ in San Francisco, and grow it to wider scale from there.

The event, later called “GitHub Field Day,” would bring together tech student leaders to learn from each others successes and mistakes, figure out what works and what doesn’t in community development, and get to know each other. Field Day would be an event where students create an agenda of their pain points and success stories. After a day of learning from each other, they could go back to their own schools and apply the lessons learned.

Support and mentorship, the GitHub way

The first week as a GitHub intern is big—kind of like moving to new city and starting a full-time job. You move into a flat in San Francisco, meet your co-workers, and get to know the team you’ll be spending time with over the summer. The Developer Relations interns also got to join the Education team for a “mini-summit”: a twice-annual team meeting where we discuss priorities and timelines, while getting a sense of how the team works together.

Something that not very many people know about GitHub is that over 60 percent of its employees work remotely. Although all interns are based in San Francisco, we worked remotely with our GitHub team members—sometimes across multiple time zones. This can be challenging at first as you learn to use a plethora of communication tools to their fullest.

For example, if your teammate lives in Scotland and you’re in San Francisco, you might get a few Slack messages outside of working hours—or even wake up to reminders about 4 am meetings.

Interns have on-boarding cohort, just like GitHubbers do–and complete with swag. Here’s the whole internship class in our navy GitHub Intern hoodies.

Launching the first Field Day

Fellow interns @jasonetco and @kim-codes and I worked quickly to gear up for a successful launch, which meant we needed branding, an announcement, and a landing page for the event. Together, we managed to get it all up and running in just five days. The morning of the event, we also put together banners, name tags, and enough food to feed dozens of students.

The hard work paid off: We received hundreds of applications from students who wanted to improve their communities, and on Field Day we had a packed house. When 50 students began to walk through the door, I knew we were onto something great—everyone was excited and had a lot to talk about.

One topic was learning design for coding beginners, particularly relevant to student-run events and hackathons. Another common pain point was how to develop a group identity, and make new members of a school's tech community feel like they belong. Students also wanted to be able to connect their campus community with other schools, something they could accomplish through the relationships they built on Field Day. We even had a surprise visit from GitHub’s Senior Vice President of Technology, @jasoncwarner who did an impromptu Q&A.

I’m happy to share that Field Day lives on: all the work going into the branding, outreach, design and reflection has now shipped to 10 scheduled events around the world.

See if Field Day is visiting a city near you

Postscript shoutout: thanks @kim-codes!

Thanks to my awesome intern cohort and especially @kim-codes—my partner-intern in crime in brainstorming, ideation, and execution.

We're just wrapping up application season for our 2018 internships. If you'd like learn more or get updates on recruiting for our 2019 intern cohort, visit internships.github.com.

How many students can help solve urgent problems within weeks of writing their first lines of code?

In Taichi Furuhashi's “Introduction to Spatial Information Systems I” at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan, students collaborate with organizations like the American Red Cross, the World Bank, the United Nations and the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

For Furuhashi, President of CrisisMappers Japan, student engagement and active learning are his primary design principles. The relatively new program helps students work together to make new tools that solve big problems.

Furuhashi’s courses have been dedicated to alleviating disasters, and his students work on different aspects of providing accurate and up-to-the-minute data to aid in relief to NGOs and industry partners.

Design principles behind the School of Global Studies and Collaboration.

From OpenStreetMap to GitHub Gist

In July of 2017 the Asakura City region of Japan was hit with heavy rains and flooding. Whole sections of southern Japan were impassible, and residents urgently needed resources like water and food.

Organizations like the Red Cross used the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s tasking manager (called HOT for short) to post requests for analysis of affected regions.

Students in Taichi's class accept a request for mapping help from the Humanitarian Open Street Map tasking manager (a.k.a. HOT).

Photos of the affected regions come in via probe drone, satellite, or panoramic camera. Students draw polygons on maps that match up with these photos to show affected regions, like mudslides, downed forests, or collapsed bridges. Then they export the GeoJSON data to a GitHub Gist file (like this one) and send the analysis back to organizations the Red Cross via HOT.

This map captures the heavy rain caused by Typhoon No. 3 on June 30, 2007. It’s based on images taken by helicopter by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. The polygons and lines indicate potentially impassable roads due to mudslide and the general reach of the flood.

The contributions that students make—their polygons and data analysis—can help authorities decide where to send resources and find flood and landslide victims. By helping local crises, the work of the class is always relevant and urgent.

GitHub 101 in Japanese

As the Director of OpenStreetMap Foundation Japan, Furuhashi involves students directly in the open source communities he’s a part of. This means mastering the GitHub flow, using GitHub Pages to make portfolio sites, and participating in open source communities.

He produced a slide deck to help onboard students to the world of GitHub and introduce them to the world of open source. The slides are, naturally, under an open license: CC BY-SA 4.0.

GitHubを活用した、赤十字と国連のためのクライシスマッピング

一体何人の学生が、初めてコードを書いてから数週間で、現実の緊急課題に自分の技術的な能力を活かせるでしょうか？
青山学院大学相模原キャンパス古橋大地教授の「空間情報システム入門I」講座では、学生が赤十字、世界銀行、国連、国際協力機構(JICA)などの組織と協力して、災害救助活動を支えています。
クライシスマッパーズ・ジャパン理事長の古橋氏にとって、講座の主な設計理念は学生の積極的な参加と学習です。この比較的新しい講座で、学生は大きな問題を解決する新しいツールを協力して作成できるよう学んでいます。
古橋氏のコースは災害による被害の軽減を目的としており、NGOや産業パートナーが安心して活動できるよう、学生は正確かつ最新のデータ提供にさまざまな側面から取り組んでいます。

地球社会共生学部の設計理念とコラボレーション

OpenStreetMapからGitHub Gistへ

2017年7月、福岡県朝倉市地域は豪雨と洪水に見舞われました。この地域の住民は孤立し、水や食料といった物資が大至急必要でした。
赤十字などの組織はHumanitarian OpenStreetMap TeamのTasking Manager (略称HOT)を活用し、被災地域の分析リクエストを投稿しました。

古橋氏のクラスの学生は、Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Tasking Manager (略称HOT)からのマッピングサポートリクエストに応じました。

探査ドローン、衛星、パノラマカメラなどから被災地域の写真が届くと、学生はそれを基に、土砂崩れ、倒木、崩落した橋など、被災地域の状況を示す多角形を地図上に描きました。その後、GeoJSONデータをGitHub Gistファイル(例)にエクスポートし、分析結果をHOT経由で赤十字に返しました。

この地図は、2017年6月30日の台風3号による豪雨の状況を示したもので、国土交通省のヘリコプターから撮影された画像を基に作成されています。多角形と線は、土砂崩れや洪水により寸断されている可能性がある道路を示します。

学生が作成した多角形とデータ分析は、支援団体による支援物資の送り先や、洪水と土砂崩れによる被災者の捜索範囲の決定に貢献しました。危機的状況にある地域を支援することで、学生は常に現実的で急を要する問題に取り組んでいます。

日本語版GitHub 101

オープンストリートマップ・ファウンデーション・ジャパンの理事として、古橋氏は自身が参加するオープンソースコミュニティに学生を直接かかわらせています。つまり、学生はGitHub Flowをマスターし、GitHub Pagesを使ってポートフォリオサイトを作成して、オープンソースコミュニティに参加しているということです。
古橋氏はスライドデッキを作成して、オープンソースの世界を紹介し、学生がGitHubの世界に入りやすくしています。これらのスライドは、当然オープンライセンス(CC BY-SA 4.0)です。