136 items tagged “github”
2018
GitHub: Weak cryptographic standards removal notice. GitHub deprecated TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 yesterday. I like how they handled the deprecation: they disabled the protocols for one hour on February 8th in order to (hopefully) warm people by triggering errors in automated processes, then disabled them completely a couple of weeks later.
owlsnearme source code on GitHub. Here’s the source code for our new owlsnearme.com project. It’s a single-page React application that pulls all of its data from the iNaturalist API. We built it this weekend with the SuperbOwl kick-off as a hard deadline so it’s not the most beautiful React code, but it’s a nice demonstration of how React (and create-react-app in particular) can be used for rapid development.
2017
A Complete CMS with No Server and 18 Lines of Code | Netlify. Slightly hyperbolic title, but there’s something really interesting going on here. Netlify is a CDN/hosting provider optimized for static site builders—it can hook up to a GitHub repository and build and deploy your site on every commit. Netlify CMS is their open-source CMS tool which works in a fascinating way: it’s a single page React app which stores structured content (as Markdown files with embedded key/value pairs) directly to your GitHub repository. Fire up Chrome DevTools and you can watch it using the GitHub API to construct new commits every time you hit “save”.
TLDR pages. This is an absurdly good idea: a community maintained set of alternative man pages for common commands with a focus on usage examples, plus a “tldr netstat” command to see them. The man pages themselves are maintained on GitHub.
Introducing security alerts on GitHub. This is huge: GitHub’s dependency graph feature now shows any dependencies that have a known security vulnerability, based on CVE IDs—and you can sign up for notifications of new vulnerabilities as well. Only supports Ruby and JavaScript today, but Python support is coming in 2018.
Datasettes · simonw/datasette. I’m collecting examples of datasette-powered APIs on the project wiki.
simonw/csvs-to-sqlite. I built a simple tool for bulk converting multiple CSV files into a SQLite database.
Pull request #4120 · python/cpython. I just had my first ever change merged into Python! It was a one sentence documentation improvement (on how to cancel SQLite operations) but it was fascinating seeing how Python’s GitHub flow is set up—clever use of labels, plus a bot that automatically checks that you have signed a copy of their CLA.
How to set up world-class continuous deployment using free hosted tools
I’m going to describe a way to put together a world-class continuous deployment infrastructure for your side-project without spending any money.
[... 1,294 words]2014
What’s the best way to keep track of changes to a project you’re not directly contributing to on github?
This is what GitHub’s “watch” feature is for: https://help.github.com/articles...
[... 35 words]2013
How did GitHub get its initial contributors?
The founders were active participants in the open source and Ruby on Rails communities. The first users were people they knew in those communities (GitHub accounts were invite only at first).
[... 44 words]How accurate is the GitHub status site?
Very accurate. Every time I’ve noticed a problem with GitHub the status site has either already published it, or publishes within a minute or so of me first noticing.
[... 42 words]What is the ways to view the examples without download the example files in github?
If you can view the file on raw.github.com you can drop the first dot to view it on rawgithub.com—a free proxy service.
[... 107 words]How could GitHub improve the password security of its users?
By doing exactly what they’re doing already: adding more sophisticated rate limiting, and preventing users from using common weak passwords.
[... 80 words]How can I invest in pre-IPO companies like Quora, Github, etc?
Get to know the founders and investors and see if you can get involved in a future funding round. If you don’t have at least a few hundred thousand dollars to invest you probably won’t get very far though, an even if you do you’d better have more than just money to bring to the table—these rounds are often over-subscribed which means the company can pick the very best out of a number of investors.
[... 139 words]What are the differences between “forking,” “cloning,” and downloading the project as a zip file on GitHub?
“fork” creates a copy of the project hosted on your own GitHub account. This is an exclusive Build software better, together. (links to: http://Github.com) feature and not a Git feature.
[... 98 words]Does GitHub hire developer advocates? If so, how do you go about applying to be one?
If you’re a good candidate for a developer advocate position, you already know how to get in touch with the right people at GitHub!
[... 81 words]Is GitHub a reliable tool if I want to upload all the non-proprietary scientific computing code I have from my hard drive?
Yes. I find GitHub is a particularly good place to host older code that you might not intend to actively maintain, as it makes it extremely easy for other people to pick up where you left off.
[... 65 words]What are prominent examples for remote work besides 37Signals, Github and Automattic?
Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) have a very impressive distributed team culture.
[... 30 words]Is there any way to visually quantify, or show your total github activity (public or private) across all projects?
The new GitHub public profile pages do a pretty great job of this:
[... 49 words]2012
Should I use Dropbox instead of Git for 2 coders? In terms of going really fast and working on things at the same time, I’m thinking it may be uber productive to use Dropbox for it’s instant syncing instead of Git/Github. What are the pros/cons?
Dropbox is definitely the wrong tool for this—you’ll find yourself running in to all sorts of weird problems very quickly if you attempt to use it this way.
[... 119 words]Is GitHub looking to be acquired?
Raising $100 million at a rumoured valuation of $750 million is not the action of a company that wants to be acquired. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09...
[... 36 words]2011
Product design at GitHub. At GitHub, every employee is a product designer.
2010
URL Design. Thoughtful tips on modern URL design, from GitHub designer Kyle Neath. GitHub has the best designed URLs of any application I can think of.
10K Apart Contest: Cheating by Compressing Your JavaScript and CSS to PNG Images. Fascinating hack: transform your JS and CSS in to coloured pixels, save the result as a PNG to benefit from PNG’s built in compression algorithms, then read the data back out of the PNG and convert it back to text using JavaScript and canvas—all to reduce the on-disk filesize when entering the 10K app competition. Alex’s GithubFinder entry is worth checking out too.
How we deploy new features. GitHub are experimenting with using Redis for configuration management. I’ve been thinking about this recently too—managing feature flags feels like an ideal use-case for Redis, since it lets you read multiple values on every page access without adding a bunch of extra read traffic on your regular database.
Zero-downtime Redis upgrade discussion. GitHub have a short window of scheduled downtime in order to upgrade their Redis server. I asked in their comments if they’d considered trying to run the upgrade with no downtime at all using Redis replication, and Ryan Tomayko has posted some interesting replies.
GitHub: Announcing SVN Support. The best kind of April Fool’s joke: one that works. It’s read-only, but that’s good enough to support referencing GitHub repositories from SVN externals.
Ryan Tomayko on Github’s development process. In the comments—a fascinating insight in to how GitHub’s “developers work on whatever is most interesting to them” process manages to achieve really good results.