October 01, 2015 / by Melanie Haessler / Web developer / @codingCookie
2 days GitHub Universe - mind blown - inspired - motivated | a late late resume
Oct 1th + 2nd 2015 - FIRST conference hosted by GitHub - GitHub Universe - and I’m in :) woohhoooo
TL;DR; It were 2 days of great talks, good for thoughts, get reminded of known but forgotten things, get to know new and interesting people - good conversations, good food, good swag - and all at a beautiful Location in SF.
The conference took place at a very nice location - an old warehouse, Pier 70, San Francisco, CA. It was a nice surrounding with a lot of art around - yarn bombed benches, graffities (eg the one from TravisCI), a Cuptocat (octocat-‘picture’ made of cups).
Besides that you had the main stage, some sponsor-areas (eg digitalOcean, Amazon AWS, Microsoft, Heroku…) and the three sections for the talks - where the knowledge happened :) A cute animated short octocat-movie opened the conference, followed by the Keynote from Chris Wanstrath, Co-Founder & CEO of GitHub. Afterwards the talks in the sections: build, collaborate and deploy started.
One of my personal Highlights
The keynote by Dr. Michael B. Johnson from Pixar aaaaahhh
- ‘Making Movies is Harder than it Looks: Building Tools for Telling Stories’. It’s amazing to hear about tools they have developed internally to solve specific every-day-challenges - like StoryBoards.
Another one of my Highlights
The talk from Jessica Lord (@jllord) ‘Electron: Desktop
Apps with Web Languages’ - she was sooooo thrilled and dedicated to Electron -
wow…catching. This talk also presented Jibo - a social robot whose skills are
done with Electron. iMustHaveOne
Besides Robot Skills you can build cross platform DESKTOP Apps with Electron by using Web Technologies (HTML, CSS, JS…).
All these tools are build on Electron wow:
- famous GitHub-Editor Atom
- new hot cross-platform Git client GitKraken (actually in beta)
- open source mail client N1
- Slack Desktop App …and many others
Another good talk
Rethinking Production Monitoring - James (@loopj) talked about how we should proceed to make sure that our software is up and running (Slides). He talks about core principles of production monitoring - Accept, Automate, Aggregate, Notify, Prioritize, Diagnose and Tend. He reminds us about what goes wrong regarding those principles - and gives some tips how you and your team could come back ‘to the right path’ ;) - eg
- Track progress of fixes
- have a Timeline in slack - like ‘deployed Release XY’ - ‘exceptions came in’
- use Failure hooks - or write own
Other interesting talks:
- Democratic Deploys at Airbnb
- Pull requests, code review, and the GitHub flow
- 10 ways people are (mis)using GitHub Pages for fun and profit
- Integrating with the GitHub API
- Organisation webhooks - to automate repository setups
- webhooks to show project-status with every push
- trigger a deployment and show its status via webhooks
- use Nagios & GitHub Issues to collaborate better around alerts
- Offline Web Apps on GitHub Pages
- Myk Melez (Mozilla) talked about oghliner, Service Workers and how to use and integrate it
- check the availability of Service Workers on caniuse.com
some hot new GitHub Stuff
Besides the talks some hot new GitHub Stuff was announced during these 2 days:
- Partnership with Yubico
- GitHub now supports U2F (Fido Universal 2nd Factor) Authentication.
You want to prevent your divers accounts on the web against Phishing and MITM attacks?
Then you might have heard of 2-Factor-Authentication - right? Good :)
You can setup you 2-Factor-Authentication by using your phone - but how will you
login if your phone runs out of power? or your phone takes a bath (and it’s useless afterwards)?
Tatatadaaaa - here’s the yubiKey :) It’s a small token - you can take it as a keychain -
and it’s also waterproof and needs no power - it’s almost indestructible.
Everything you want for your 2-Factor-Authentication, right? ;)
Besides GitHub you can use it for eg Dropbox, Gmail and Google Apps and many more.Check it out on the yubico-page
GitHub encourages developers to integrate this Authentication-Method into their Appsread more
- U2F doesn’t need drivers or special DesktopSoftware - it’s already implemented in Browsers and Platforms - the user only needs a little HardwareToken - eg the YubiKey
- GitHub now supports U2F (Fido Universal 2nd Factor) Authentication.
You want to prevent your divers accounts on the web against Phishing and MITM attacks?
Then you might have heard of 2-Factor-Authentication - right? Good :)
You can setup you 2-Factor-Authentication by using your phone - but how will you
login if your phone runs out of power? or your phone takes a bath (and it’s useless afterwards)?
Tatatadaaaa - here’s the yubiKey :) It’s a small token - you can take it as a keychain -
and it’s also waterproof and needs no power - it’s almost indestructible.
Everything you want for your 2-Factor-Authentication, right? ;)
Besides GitHub you can use it for eg Dropbox, Gmail and Google Apps and many more.Check it out on the yubico-page
GitHub encourages developers to integrate this Authentication-Method into their Appsread more
- Git LSF
- since the begin of October you can version your large Files - like audio samples, datasets, graphics, and videos - in your repository. Git LFS is an extension that replaces large files with text pointers inside Git. The file itself is stored on a remote server like GitHub.com or GitHub Enterprise.
- Integrations Directory
-
here you find a bunch of tools (like TravisCI, Codeship, ReviewNinja, Codetree…) which can be easily integrated in GitHub. The tools are divided in the 3 main pillars of GitHub - build, collaborate and deploy. You can find tools to
- help you with your code review process - like ReviewNinja or Reviewable …
- help you organizing your issues as a TaskBoard - eg Waffle.io …
- support you with your CI and/or deploy process - eg TravisCI or Codeship.
The number of integrations increases constantly - worth a look.
-
During the breaks
I spoke with other attendees and some of the sponsors around - it was unbelievable to meet the people who create some of the tools you use (daily)…
- thanks @ashleyrmoretz from Waffle.io
for the nice feature-talk and the T-Shirts - my colleagues like them (Kim on Twitter)
- thanks @heroku for the T-Shirt and answering my questions :)
Some of the Keynotes show how technology can help on (social) problems and situations I never thought of before - like the Keynote from Tiffani Ashley Bell[@tiffani(https://twitter.com/tiffani) talking about the ’Detroit Water Project’. I never thought about not being able to pay a water bill resulting to losing my house. Tiffani and a few others got aware of this situation and developed the ’Detroit Water Project‘-page within one night - remote - on GitHub. On their page you can sign up if you need help to pay your bill or you can donate money to help with a water bill. They already helped over 900 families in Detroit to not lose their homes - WOW! - and that’s only one of thousands of amazing ideas.
Last but not least
…the streams for all three sections (session are listed on the right side of the streams)
I had a blast at GitHub Universe - again in 2016? - hopefully :)
some impressions