The GitHub Blog

Today I welcomed more than 1,500 people to our second annual Universe conference in San Francisco, an event designed to celebrate the people building the future of software. It’s an important reminder about who we’re here for—whether it’s the open source maintainer whose project is transforming healthcare, an automotive company building a self-driving car, or a teenager teaching herself how to program after she finishes her homework.

Our goal is to make building software easier for you. And with that goal in sight, we’re announcing our biggest update to the platform yet. We’re making it easier for you to work together to ship high-quality code through improved code review tools, and we’re giving our profiles an update to better show who you are as a developer. We’re making integrating with GitHub a first class experience through major API improvements. And we’re taking steps toward making GitHub a better place for businesses to get work done with added security measures for organizations.

I’m proud of our team for coming together to ship so many improvements to the platform, and I hope you’ll find them useful as you continue to build amazing things. Read on for more specifics, and keep an eye out for continued improvements to your GitHub experience in the coming months.

Manage your ideas with Projects

Taking projects from idea to launch isn’t easy. There’s a lot to coordinate behind the scenes, and so many tools out there to help you organize and distribute work. To help you integrate project management into your development cycle without skipping a beat (or even opening a new browser tab), we’re introducing Projects.

With Projects, you can manage work directly from your GitHub repositories. Create cards from Pull Requests, Issues or Notes and organize them into custom columns, whether it’s "In-progress", "Done", "Never going to happen" or any other framework your team uses. Drag and drop the cards inside a column to prioritize them or move them from one column to another as your work progresses. And with Notes, you can capture every early idea that comes up as part of your standup or team sync, without polluting your list of issues. For more on what's changed, watch this quick overview.

Although we’ll quickly be adding to Projects, our initial release currently supports:

• A New Projects tab–at the same level as Code, Issue, Pull Requests within a repository–that lists all of your projects
• Workflow columns that you can name and reorder
• Cards that you can drag and drop between columns pointing to issues, Pull Requests, or notes
• Tools built on top of Projects by some fantastic partners, including Waffle.io and ZenHub

Code better with Reviews

Collaboration is the core of building great software—and code review is critical to collaboration. When another person looks at your code and gives it the same level of critique that you did while writing it, your work gets better. We’re improving code review on GitHub to help you share the weight of building software and improve the software you build.

Designing the best way for you to review code is a continuous process, but our first step is now available on all pull requests—Reviews. In addition to commenting on specific lines of code, Reviews let you formally “approve” or “request changes” to pull requests. You can also leave a review summary and delete, edit, or bundle comments before you submit them.

To streamline conversations and cut down on noise, you can reply to inline comments without drafting a formal review or starting a new conversation. This also means you can have multiple conversations per line of code—creating more explicit feedback loops, smarter conversations, and better code review.

Finally, administrators can require Reviews before merging via protected branches. When Reviews are required, you must have a least one approval and no changes requested before you can merge.

These changes are only the first step of a much greater roadmap toward faster, friendlier code reviews. We’re working on a handful of follow-up feature improvements—including the ability to request reviews from your peers. For more information on Reviews, including what we’ve shipped today, check out the documentation or a quick tutorial video on Reviews.

Integrate seamlessly with GitHub

Developers use a variety of tools to ship their software and we’ve seen hundreds of integrations built to work with GitHub. Now we’re shipping some major improvements to our API and adding new ways to collaborate transparently not only with GitHub engineers but also the broader community of integrators. As host to the largest community of developers, we want to make the GitHub platform uniquely enjoyable for integrators to build applications that change how people work. Here’s what we’re launching right away:

• A public Platform Roadmap that demonstrates what GitHub Platform Engineers are launching next and why
• A formalized process to solicit feedback and launch updates to our platform
• Early-access and pre-release programs that let you access new features and APIs and provide you with the support you need to ensure launch readiness for the software you build on top of GitHub
• The GitHub Platform Forum which provides a direct communication channel between ecosystem developers and GitHub engineers.

With that, we are excited to announce two new projects that aim to make our platform more flexible:

Integrations Early Access

We’re rethinking our integrations model to provide better ways for tools to extend and integrate with GitHub. We’ve added the ability for an integration to act on its own behalf instead of impersonating a user—making it a first class actor on GitHub without using a paid seat. Admins will have the ability to configure integrations directly on Organizations and control which repositories they allow access to. Read more about Integrations on our Developer Blog or check out the documentation.

The GitHub GraphQL API Early Access

The GraphQL API simplifies your product development by letting developers access all the data they need, and only the data they need, with one API call. With the GitHub GraphQL API, you get the same API we use to build GitHub features. To learn more and see how it works, check out our Engineering Blog.

Have a friendlier business experience on GitHub.com

Organizations on GitHub are the best way for teams of developers to build and ship software together, and with the added security of two-factor authentication enforcement and upcoming product enhancements, they’ve never been better.

Easily enforce security

Now Organization administrators can require two-factor authentication for all members—making it easier to support security policies.

Admins will be asked to confirm the two-factor authentication requirement and a confirmation modal will list members and forks that will be removed as a result. GitHub will notify members if they’re being removed from an organization with email and in-product notifications. Finally, as always, admins can invite members back with their forks and settings intact once their security is up to speed. Read more about requiring two-factor authentication in your organization.

Take greater control over your permissions

Over the last few years, we’ve rolled out LDAP and CAS to securely and efficiently manage permissions on GitHub Enterprise. Now we’re making sure businesses on GitHub.com have the tools they need to automate identity and access management. Our first public launch is a SAML-based Single Sign-on (SSO) option. Administrators will have the ability to manage their GitHub users through the identity provider that already manages access to the host of applications they use in their current workflow. This option isn’t ready quite yet, but it will launch as a beta in the coming months. Sign up to try it out when it does.

Get help from the GitHub Community

We’re grateful to have a community of more than 16 million developers. While developers gain experience implicitly on GitHub as they work alongside other developers, we know that’s not enough. To help, we’re creating a dedicated space for you to learn from each other—and to have conversations about GitHub itself.

The GitHub Community Forum will become a place where developers can talk shop, get help, and learn together. It will also help us introduce new features and improvements and give developers the ability to share thoughts and feedback with us directly. Look out for the GitHub Community Forum in 2017.

See what’s behind your green squares

Your profile now contains your entire history of work on GitHub, from your first commit to your most recent pull request. And a per-repository breakdown reveals where you're spending your time each month. You can see special events in your history—the day you signed up for GitHub, opened your first pull request, or joined an organization—and showcase your best work by pinning favorite projects to your profile. For more on what’s changed, take a look at the documentation or watch the video.

While I’m really excited about these improvements to GitHub, I’m more excited to see what you’ll create with them.

As we take this moment to celebrate our community at GitHub Universe, we're amazed yet again by how the Octoverse has expanded and changed. Our community has grown to more than 16 million people strong, hacking on things like Free Code Camp, an open source curriculum that helps nonprofits; and Batavia, an implementation of the Python virtual machine.

We want to welcome the more than 5.2 million new developers who joined our community in the last year and applaud the more than 800,000 of you for creating your first pull request. Many of you have joined us from all over the world—we saw explosive international growth from China, Indonesia, India, Russia, Brazil, and Japan.

GitHub is about bringing people together to collaborate on world-changing technology, and in doing so, creating a constantly expanding universe of code. Join us for a spin through the latest installment of the Octoverse in 2016 and we can't wait to see how you help us grow the Octoverse in 2017 and beyond.

Couldn't make it out to San Francisco for GitHub Universe this week? We've got you covered. Every session from the main stage to breakout sessions are being recorded and live streamed on the GitHub Universe website starting today at 10AM. This is your chance to hang out with all of our featured speakers from home.

Highlights

• Opening keynote from Chris Wanstrath, CEO and Co-Founder, GitHub
• Roman Mars will be doing his 99% Invisible podcast live from our stage
• Fireside Chat with Bret Taylor, CEO and Co-Founder, Quip
• Hear how The White House builds trust through data transparency from Clarence Wardell, Member of USDS
• Join Benjamin, AI screenwriter of Sunspring, along with his human chaperones Oscar Sharp and Ross Goodwin, as we explore the potential of writing machines and augmented creativity
• Learn about Open Source challenges from GitHub, Salesforce Desk, Netsuite, and more
• Learn how your company can decrease time to market and increase ROI with InnerSource from Bloomberg, Line, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Walmart, and IBM
• Hear how to actually make a difference with diversity and inclusion

Watch now

And much more. Head over to to the live stream now to check out the full lineup.

Datadog is now offering their Pro plan to students in the Student Developer Pack.

With Datadog, you'll be able to see metrics from all your apps, tools, and services. The plan allows you to:

• Monitor up to 10 concurrent hosts.
  
• Retain stock and custom metrics for up to 13 months.
  
• Create insightful dashboards to demonstrate the performance and availability of your applications.
  
• Create notifications upon failures.
  

Datadog provides monitoring and alerting for anything from your first app to multiple servers.

The Student Developer Pack gives students free access to the best developer tools from different technology companies like Stripe, Travis CI, and Unreal Engine.

Students, get monitoring now with your pack.

GitHub Universe will kick off on Tuesday, September 13, with a fun-filled day of training organized into distinct tracks for GitHub power users and dev ops specialists. Reserve your spot now with the purchase of a general conference ticket. All trainings will take place at Dogpatch Studios.

Track 1: GitHub power users

Getting Started with InnerSource

Open Source has taught us a lot about collaborating on and crafting world-class software. In this session, you'll learn how to initiate an InnerSource transformation within your organization, so you may benefit, culturally and technologically, from the open source model.

Blasting Off with the GitHub API

New to API development? Come and get a head start with this guided tour of the GitHub API. You'll learn what's possible and pick up some reusable code you can apply to your own projects while following best practices.

Git Cozy

Sometimes mistakes are made. We're here to help you win the admiration of your family, friends, and coworkers when those mistakes involve Git.

Track 2: Dev ops

The Plumbers Guide to the Galaxy: Implementing a CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub

Learn to navigate the ecosystem that GitHub enables in this comprehensive tour of CI and CD best practices.

GitHub Integrations & the Project Lifecycle

Make the most of your best-of-breed integrations with GitHub. Join Heroku, ZenHub, and Snyk as we dive into tips, tricks, and best practices.

Life Embetterment with Hubot

ChatOps isn't just about automation. Hear about how to promote transparency, autonomy, and security within your organization.

Ask GitHub Services!

Want a chance to chat with experts about Git or GitHub after Training Day? Stop by the Ask Services booth at GitHub Universe (Sept. 14 - 15) to speak with a member of the Professional Services team. Sign up for this complimentary 30 minute session here.

Since we have a limited number of spots available, we'll handle all on a first-come-first-served basis.

Transifex is now offering translation and localization software to students in the Student Developer Pack. Transifex is a cloud-based platform built to help you manage the translation and localization of your software.

Members are eligible for a free year of the Starter plan, a $99/month value. You'll get 50,000 hosted words, unlimited projects, and access to translation partners to bring your software to a global market from the start. You can create software that works internationally from the moment you build your app.

Students also receive 10 team collaborators and can reuse existing translations across your projects.

The Student Developer Pack gives you free access to the best developer tools from different technology companies like Stripe, Travis CI, and Unreal Engine.

Get translating now with your pack.

If you'd like to start using GitHub or just see what it's all about, we're kicking off a new way for you to learn the basics. Introduction to GitHub is a self-paced, online class designed to help you:

• Get started using GitHub.com in 30 minutes or less.
• Make new friends while collaborating on a fun project.
• Dive into the worlds of GitHub and open source.

Unlike many self-paced training classes where you are completely alone, this one has a thriving Gitter community where GitHub Trainers drop in several times a day to answer questions and help those who are stuck. During the course, you are encouraged to complete an activity where you will drop a pin on our map representing your current location. Check out our current pins here to see where people are learning.

This course is 100 percent free forever and uses several popular open source projects to create a seamless learning experience. Here are a few of the projects we would like to thank:

• GitHub Classroom
• Jekyll
• Minimal Mistakes: A Jekyll theme
• Travis CI

Even if you've been using GitHub for a while, we hope you will try out the course and share your feedback in the class survey. If you think it's a good introduction to GitHub, we hope you will share the class) with others who'd like to learn.

Applications are now open for summer internships at GitHub. Interns will spend nine weeks from June to August working out of our headquarters in San Francisco with teams in engineering, product, marketing, legal, design, and more.

Our interns are placed within existing teams, work on impactful projects, and gain experience with help from professional mentors. Learn more about the program by reading stories from the 2016 interns.

GitHub Interns - Summer 2016

To qualify for the GitHub internship program you must be a student enrolled in a university, community college, associate, or graduate school program.

2017 Summer Internship Opportunities

More internship opportunities may become available, see our jobs listings for current postings. If you'd like to stay up to date on new openings, sign up for email updates.

• Accounting Intern
• Application Engineering Intern
• Application Security Intern
• Campaign Marketing Intern - Back to school 2017
• Community and Safety Engineering Intern
• Customer Success Intern
• Developer Evangelist Intern - Campus Experts Summer
• Graphic Design for Instruction Intern
• Legal Profession Innovation Intern
• Open Source Economics Intern
• Policy Research Intern
• Privacy Intern
• Product Security Engineering Intern
• Rails Developer Intern - GitHub Classroom
• Social Impact Program Coordinator Intern

If you've ever wanted to make minor changes before merging a pull request, now you can. When a user opens a pull request from a fork, they'll be given a new option that allows the upstream repository contributors to collaborate with them on their new branch.

Simply clone the contributor's fork and, if you've been granted permission, you'll be able to push changes to the head branch on the open pull request, even if you don't normally have permission to push to the fork.

Pull requests created before the option was available will default to not allowing collaboration, but contributors can also enable or revoke permission, by using the new checkbox in the pull request sidebar.

Learn more about collaborating with forks in our help guide.

Community Partners are helping us build a diverse, inclusive environment at GitHub Universe. We select partners based on several criteria but the three main questions we ask ourselves when reaching out to partners are:

• Do they have an audience that can benefit from complimentary tickets to the conference?
• Does their work focus on lowering the barriers to entry for people from underrepresented backgrounds?
• Are they making a positive social impact, namely in the geographic region where the conference is?

We know that the cost of attending a tech conference is prohibitive for far too many. We also know that bringing people from disparate backgrounds fosters innovation—something that our industry relies heavily on. Lastly, we're aware that folks across communities do work that makes the tech industry better for everyone. What better way to create the environment we want than to take the time to listen to members of our local community, create space for their voices, and include them in our efforts to put down roots of our own?

With that, we are honored to announce this year’s Community Partners for GitHub Universe. We are happy to host small groups from each of these organizations and we encourage you to learn more about them.

Women Who Code:

Women Who Code East Bay is a local chapter of Women Who Code, an international nonprofit dedicated to providing free technical resources to women (including transgender and gender non-binary folks) world-wide. We partner with local tech companies to provide workshops, networking opportunities, and study groups to communities who have historically been denied access and strive to improve the industry through diversity.

Interested in getting involved? Come to a meet up.

Year Up:

Year Up is a non-profit organization that has created a one-year intensive training and education program that provides high school graduates and GED recipients from the Bay Area with a combination of hands-on skill development and corporate internship opportunities. Its mission is to close the Opportunity Divide by providing urban young adults with the skills, experience, and support that will empower them to reach their potential through professional careers and higher education. Our young adults develop valuable, in-demand skills, and our corporate partners gain access to a strong pipeline of talent to meet their hiring needs.

“As technology companies continue to scale, their commitment to practices that support diversity and inclusion will be a key ingredient in their ability to access and secure high-level talent, enabling them to meet market demand.” – Allan Alday, Associate Director of Partner Relations, Year Up Bay Area

Tech Workers Coalition:

The Tech Workers Coalition stands with workers. We are a community-centered coalition of tech workers, labor organizers and community organizers. The Tech Workers Coalition seeks to redefine the relationship between tech workers and Bay Area communities. Through activism, civic engagement and education, we work in solidarity with existing movements towards social justice and economic inclusion.

Interested in getting involved?

We'll be meeting and greeting on Sept 27 at 6:30 pm to talk about upcoming actions and ways people can support. Email hello@techworkersco.org for details. Also join our newsletter at techworkerscoalition.org or follow us on Twitter @techworkersco for more events and updates.

Code Tenderloin:

Code Tenderloin is a workforce development start-up that provides job readiness, job training, and job placement for residents of the Tenderloin and other San Francisco communities that experience “Tenderloin-like” situations. Our mission is to quickly integrate marginalized communities into the burgeoning mid-market job economy so that all San Franciscans can share in the gains of local economic development and wealth creation. We work with citizens—typically 18 to 25 years old from communities of color and communities of low-income—who generally face the highest barriers to employment.

To distribute our tickets, we selected Code Tenderloin partners who have a passion to participate in the world of programming and all things tech-related; many are graduates from our inaugural June 2016 Code Ramp class.

The open source Git project has just released Git 2.10.0, with features and bugfixes from over 70 contributors. Here's our look at some of the most interesting new features:

Progress reporting for pushes

When you run git push, you've probably seen a progress meter telling you how many objects you've sent, how many are left, and how fast the data is moving. But what happens after all of the data has made it to the server? Are we done?

Not quite. Even though the receiver of a push does as much work as possible while the data is flowing in, there are a few CPU-intensive tasks it can't start until the whole thing has arrived. And while that's happening, Git is completely silent. Most pushes are small enough that this phase finishes quickly, and you never notice. But when pushing a large number of objects, this can take many seconds or even minutes, leaving you to wonder if things are still working.

Worse, because the network connection is completely silent during this phase, you run the risk of the connection being dropped by HTTP proxies or other network infrastructure. That's an easy way to turn your wondering into frustration.

Git 2.10 adds progress reports for these post-receive operations, to keep you entertained and to make sure the network knows we're still going.

Of course you're not always around to watch those progress meters. For pushes without a terminal (or run with --quiet), Git 2.10 also sends periodic "keepalive" packets to keep the network connection running.

The progress reporting and keepalives are all implemented on the server side of the connection, and are backwards-compatible with all existing versions of Git. So you don't even need to upgrade to see them (but your hosting provider does).

A few other progress-related improvements came along for the ride, too. git clone now gives an accurate progress meter when checking that it received all of the necessary objects. And some progress messages, like those from an auto-gc of the remote repository, are more clearly marked as coming from the remote.

[source, source]

Signature verification improvements

GPG-signed tags and commits have been a part of Git for a long time, but the workflows and tooling around them are still not that convenient to use. Git 2.10 takes a few incremental steps in this area. Along with some behind-the-scenes robustness improvements, it adds a new configuration option, log.showSignature, to verify signatures for every invocation of git log.

The default output format for signature verification has also been changed to show 64-bit GPG key-ids, even when using older versions of GPG (64-bit ids are already the default on newer versions). This is in response to the Evil 32 project, which showed how easy it is to generate "fake" keys which collide in the 32-bit key-id space. That project is two years old, but got new attention recently as somebody uploaded all of the fake keys from their dataset to the public keyservers.

If you're not yet signing your commits and tags, there are several guides to help you get started.

[source, source, source]

More color attributes

You've probably seen that Git can produce colorful output in your terminal. But did you know that those colors are configurable, or that you can use them in custom log formats and prompts? Some people get pretty fancy.

Git 2.10 comes with a few new options: its color code now understands italic and strikethrough attributes.

In addition, the %C(auto) placeholder has been fixed (which is handy if you are designing custom log output), color support now works out of the box on FreeBSD, and the default colors for HEAD decorations have been tweaked to increase visibility.

[source, source, source, source]

Odds and ends

• You shouldn't ever need to debug your HTTP connections, but if you do, Git 2.10 supports the GIT_TRACE_CURL environment variable. It supersedes the old GIT_CURL_VERBOSE variable, and gives more details, supports redirecting to a file (to avoid tangling with the rest of Git's output), and most importantly, will automatically scrub your authentication information from the result, making it safe to share the output with a fellow debugger. [source]

• The smart-http protocol will now grow its negotiation windows more aggressively, which should result in fewer round-trips when fetching a large repository over HTTP. [source]

• submodule update and clone --recursive have learned to retry a single cloning failure for each submodule, to make ephemeral server and network failures less annoying. [source]

• Manpages in the terminal will now have literal phrases shown in bold (these are generally shown in a fixed-space typewriter font in the HTML pages, but were not decorated at all in the terminal). [source]

• Git's internal date-formatting code can now correctly show dates past the year 2100. Phew, fixed with only 84 years to spare. [source]

• Similarly, git archive can now generate tarfiles with POSIX extensions to handle files larger than 8GB, and timestamps later than the year 2242 (8 giga-seconds since 1970). [source]

The whole enchilada

That's just a sampling of the changes in Git 2.10, which contains over 600 commits. Check out the the full release notes for the complete list.

Olivia Ross is a high school sophomore at Phillips Exeter Academy. After teaching herself to code in junior high, she found herself addicted to this new medium for her creativity. Now a game designer, she's taken her coding skills and blended them with the humanities. As she explores the rapidly emerging field of interactive media arts, she volunteers as a technical instructor at Black Girls CODE events in NYC to help girls of color find that same creative energy within themselves and become the leaders of tomorrow.

She shared her thoughts with us on the mission of Black Girls CODE, the future of game design, and some advice for young women trying to break into tech.

How did you first discover you were interested in technology?

I was first interested in tech during spring break in sixth grade. My brother was in college, and he came home with a book about HTML and CSS. He was not particularly interested in it, and he tossed it aside somewhere. I found it and I was kind of fascinated by it.

After he took the book back to school, I tried to do some research online about web development and accidentally clicked “View Source.” I honestly thought I’d broken the browser. However, after googling the first line of the source code which happened to just be < header > tags, I realized that was what HTML looked like. I realized I never wanted to be confused about technology again. I wanted to understand everything about how it worked. Needless to say, I became a very proficient "Googler."

How did you become involved with Black Girls Code and what was the experience like?

The summer before sixth grade, I went to an environmental science camp. It was interesting and fun but after I discovered computing, I knew I’d rather spend the summer learning more about code indoors rather than swatting mosquitoes outdoors. I thought I'd continue to read all that I could find but my sister who lives in the Bay Area where Black Girls CODE originally started, told my mom about BGC New York chapter’s hackathon and signed me up.

It was a two-day hackathon where we built apps to combat domestic violence. My team won, and so we went to another hackathon at the Essence Festival in New Orleans, and I got to mentor another group, who won second prize.

I feel that if I hadn’t participated in BGC, I wouldn’t have discovered the greater possibilities around computer science—the fun parts. There were no CS programs at my school, so I was kind of on my own. It’s funny, but I really relate to the “brogrammer” stereotype, studying alone in my bedroom, huddled over my computer in the dark. What I discovered through BGC is that I enjoy coding in a group so much more than by myself. Through BGC, I also realized I didn’t have to divide myself between art and computer science—I can do both!

Do you have any role models who have helped you along the way? Do you plan to mentor other young women in the future?

I did not have a role model in the literal sense. In the beginning, I was really only trying to see what I could learn on my own through online tutorials and group forums. After I went to a couple BGC meetups, I met a college student named Brianna Fugate. I aspired to be like her because not only was she so knowledgeable, she actively reached out to her community and mentored younger girls. I respect and prioritize that. I also have a lot of admiration for some female game designers that I follow on Twitter.

Computer science curriculum was non-existent at my school when I was first starting out. I consider myself pretty lucky to now be attending a high school that’s well known for having a strong computer science program, as well as a very active community of students who have a real passion for it. I’m excited to see what kind of programmer and artist I’ll become over the next few years in this environment.

Professionally, I want to work in STEM education. I think it’s really meaningful and important to make technology more diverse. STEM education and art—the intersection there is really important and cool.

What are some of your favorite projects that you’ve worked on? What accomplishments are you most proud of?

I’m pretty proud of the project I’m working on now for Uncharted Play. I’ve been developing a tabletop game to cement the topics within their core curriculum and to encourage convergent and divergent thinking in children. Despite being aimed at elementary schoolers, however, adults seem to find it pretty fun!

Another project I worked on at summer camp before 8th grade was published to the App Store, which felt really good to say just now. It’s called SuperBlock. It’s an infinite runner, similar to games like Temple Run, where you play as a rectangle that’s secretly a superhero. Your superpower gives you the option of growing taller or smaller. However, when you grow bigger, you’re too heavy to jump. The obstacles coming toward you come in varying sizes. When you’re big, you can just smash through the large obstacles but you have to quickly shrink to jump over the shorter ones. The game speeds up slowly to increase the difficulty while allowing users to learn how to play.

Through Black Girls CODE, I was able to present SuperBlock in front of hundreds of people (including White House CTO, Megan Smith) at the 2016 MAKERS Conference. While there remains a graveyard of unfinished projects on my computer, I think I will always be proud of that one.

What does the future hold for you? Do you have specific ideas about what you would like to do?

I definitely want to keep making games. I’d love to make a living off of developing games independently. However, I doubt I’d be able to make the next big thing right away—those kinds of things rarely happen on accident.

A really awesome job would be working in STEM education. I currently am the co-director of this organization of high-school students that put on STEM events in New York City. We’re called The Young Hackers and we’ve been around since 2014. The thing I adore most about working here is that I get to see real impact on my community. We create inspiring and inclusive spaces where children from all backgrounds and identities can discover what CS can offer them.

I also really love teaching. I’ve been volunteering at Black Girls CODE, most recently as a Technical Instructor. A few weeks ago, I taught a class full of twenty young girls between the ages of six and nine how to build apps in MIT App Inventor. I spent a good portion of a hackathon last weekend making a tutorial on web games in Phaser for a workshop I am planning. Working at places like Khan Academy, Sesame Workshop, or even making learning games like I do for Uncharted Play would be amazing to continue to do in the future.

What advice would you give to a young black woman who is wondering about how to get into technology but is feeling discouraged or nervous?

I think that if someone wants to get into the field of technology, you should know straight away that finding people who look like you is going to be very difficult. I have yet to go to a hackathon that the Young Hackers didn’t organize where I could quickly find another black girl. Don’t have any shame in taking advantage of every single opportunity. They don’t exist to make things easier. They exist to level the playing field.

Even if you find that some places are hostile, there’s someone somewhere who wants you to work for them. It’s important to know that there are inclusive spaces if you look for them, where you can go and create, where people want to see you do well.

There are tons of ways to support Black Girls CODE and help young people get the foundation they need to do something amazing with technology. You can donate, mentor, or if you’re in the Bay Area, join us for a benefit concert featuring artist and actor Common.

GitHub Universe is just around the corner and we’ve added even more featured speakers and panels to the lineup.

Featured speakers

Roman Mars, 99% Invisible
Roman Mars is the host and creator of 99% Invisible—one of the most popular podcasts in the world about design and architecture. Fast Company named him one of the 100 Most Creative People in 2013 and he was a TED main stage speaker in 2015.

Ross Goodwin and Oscar Sharp, Sunspring
Together these two created Benjamin, the world’s first A.I. screenwriter, and shot Sunspring, a sci-fi short film entirely written by an A.I. bot starring Silicon’s Valley’s Thomas Middleditch. Explore the potential of writing machines and augmented creativity in this featured session.

Machisté Quintana and Devin Foley, Slack
Hear how Slack builds their app with Electron, an open source framework that lets you create cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

Hui Ding, Instagram
Learn about the tools Instagram has built and how they are used to optimize daily development flow and support a community that has doubled in size in just two years to more than 500 million users.

Interactive panels

Bloomberg, HPE, Walmart, and IBM
Hear how tech leaders across industries incorporate open source methodologies into the way they build and ship their own software.

Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and CMU
Learn what information you can glean from community activity on GitHub from leading researchers and open source teams at some of the largest software companies in the world.

Software is more than code, and at Universe we're exploring it all.

Get Tickets

When you check your GitHub account today, you’ll see an announcement letting you know that we’ve updated our Privacy Statement. Check it out!

Before we get into what’s new, rest assured that your information is still safe and sound. We have not made any substantive changes to the way we handle your information. For example, we still . . .

• don’t sell your personal information to any third parties for their commercial purposes;
• don’t have advertising on GitHub;
• only require a small amount of information; and
• only use your information for the purpose of providing services to you.

What’s changed

The new Privacy Statement clarifies quite a few things about how GitHub uses data, and how we permit third parties to use your information. For example, the new Privacy Statement describes how people such as researchers or archivists can use your public information on GitHub.com, and it explains that third parties using public information must respect our users’ choices. The new Privacy Statement now also includes a statement regarding tracking—we don’t track your web browsing off our site, and we don’t let third parties track you on GitHub.

Privacy Shield compliance

With this updated Privacy Statement, we’ve also applied for certification with the new EU–US Privacy Shield Framework. Privacy Shield is an agreement between the US Department of Commerce and the European Commission that provides companies in both the United States and the European Union a mechanism to comply with EU data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the EU to the US. We expect to receive our certification shortly, and we currently comply with the Privacy Shield Principles to protect all our users’ information.

Protecting our users

Although the Privacy Shield is only directed to users in the European Union, GitHub is committed to protecting all our users equally, regardless of where you live. So we are extending Privacy Shield’s benefits to all our users, including access to a free independent arbitration provider for privacy disputes.

Please take a few minutes to look over the new Privacy Statement, and please reach out if you have any questions.

Gone are the days of booths and demos. GitHub Universe and Satellite sponsors help us make so much more possible. From food trucks and lounges to installations by local artists, our sponsors create beautiful, interactive experiences—not noise or sales pitches.

GitHub Universe—held September 13-15 in San Francisco—will bring together developers, open source advocates, systems and operations administrators, and entrepreneurs from across the GitHub community. This year’s sponsors are as varied as our crowd, and they’re helping us plan some special experiences that will provide something for everyone.

Sponsorships touch all of GitHub Universe, including this year’s after party at the historic Masonic, The Big Bang. At The Big Bang, artist and actor COMMON will headline a benefit concert for Black Girls Code open to both conference attendees and the general public.

All of our sponsors have room to get creative at Pier 70 and the Masonic—and there's still time to make something magical happen. Get in touch this week or pick up tickets. You'll be in great company.

Thank you so much to our 2016 sponsors for joining our community and making Universe a better place.