Open-source can play a critical role in tackling the UK’s developer shortage

It is no secret that developers have never been more in demand. According to a recent analysis, the shortage of “programmers and software development professionals” only ranks behind HGV drivers and nurses as the occupation where worker shortages are most acute in the UK.

The sheer pace of digital transformation across every industry means the demand for developer talent continues to outstrip supply at a rapid rate – and the situation shows no sign of abating. Just about...

25 January 2022 | Git

Open-source developer corrupted his own popular libraries

An open-source developer intentionally corrupted his own libraries that have been used by thousands of projects.

Users of open-source projects that depend on the ‘colors’ and ‘faker’ libraries by Marak Squires were confronted with their applications indefinitely printing gibberish messages on their console—rendering them useless.

The colors library receives over 20 million weekly downloads on npm alone and has almost 19,000 projects depending on it. The faker...

10 January 2022 | Open Source

GitHub launches preview of improved code search

GitHub is making significant improvements to its code searching experience and has launched a technology preview for an early peek.

The current search index covers more than five million of the most popular public repositories. In addition, developers can also search any private repositories they have access to.

GitHub recommends trying five search functions to see how they could improve your workflow:

Try a simple search and see how the smart ranking and...

9 December 2021 | Development Tools

GitHub Octoverse 2021: Developer diversity is increasing, code is shipping faster than ever

The 2021 edition of GitHub’s annual Octoverse report highlights a welcome increase in the diversity of the developer community alongside many other interesting trends.

According to the report, almost 60 percent of active GitHub users are now distributed outside North America. The world’s largest repo service is seeing the fastest user growth in Indonesia, Brazil, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Canada, the UK, and China.

Developers are both writing and shipping code...

16 November 2021 | Git

Thomas Dohmke will be GitHub’s new CEO

Thomas Dohmke is taking over from Nat Friedman to become GitHub’s new CEO.

Dohmke co-founded HockeyApp – a service to help distribute beta versions of apps and get analytics and crash reports – in 2011, to solve some of his paint points as a developer.

He took this passion for solving pain points to GitHub in 2018 after leading Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub alongside Friedman.

In a blog post, Dohmke wrote:

“Leading the home for all...

3 November 2021 | Databases

Travis CI flaw exposed thousands of open-source projects’ secrets

A flaw in popular software testing tool Travis CI exposed the secrets of thousands of open-source projects.

Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service used to build and test software projects hosted on GitHub and Bitbucket.

For at least a week – between 3-10 Sept – open-source repos that used Travis CI had their keys, credentials, and tokens exposed.

Ethereum developer Felix Lange discovered a flaw with how Travis CI handled environmental...

16 September 2021 | Development Tools

GitHub releases analysis of relations between developers and security researchers

Relations between developers and security researchers is critical, but it’s no secret they’re often fraught.

GitHub first announced that it was expanding its research to more fully understand the relationship between developer and security research communities in December 2020. The initial analysis, conducted by GitHub Security Lab, has now been released.

For its debut analysis, Github focused on the vulnerability disclosure process—of which there is currently no...

10 September 2021 | Hacking & Security

Linus Torvalds: GitHub creates ‘absolutely useless garbage’ merges

Linux and Git creator Linus Torvalds has criticised GitHub for creating “absolutely useless garbage merges”.

Torvalds’ comment can be viewed in an archive of a Linux development mailing list and was directed at Konstantin Komarov, Founder and CEO of Paragon Software, about the submission of its read-write NTFS driver for the upcoming 5.15 kernel.

“github creates absolutely useless garbage merges, and you should never ever use the github interfaces to merge...

8 September 2021 | Git

GitHub Discussions exits beta to help boost developer communities

GitHub’s collaboration-driving feature Discussions is exiting beta to help developer communities thrive.

Discussions enable developers to make repos fun, collaborative, and engaging spaces with features like the ability to pin big announcements, label discussions, mark the most helpful answers, personalise categories, and respond on-the-go via mobile.

Later this year, GitHub will be adding two more features:

Ask your community with polls. With the new Polls...

18 August 2021 | Git

Stanford Law and GitHub launch initiative to protect open-source developers

Stanford Law and GitHub are partnering on an initiative to protect the legal rights of open-source developers.

Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from 1998 prohibits the circumvention of technological measures employed by, or on behalf of, copyright owners to protect access to their works.

Open-source developers regularly face takedown claims under Section 1201 but, rather than fight it, they often decide to avoid the cost and risk by just removing the...

27 July 2021 | Git