Welcome to this week's episode of The Devops Lab we're post Github Universe and we have a
very special guest with us this week, Damian Brady who's going to walk us through some
of the coolest features that have come out of GitHub universe 2021 so tune in!
Welcome to this week's episode of The Devops Lab with us this week we have an
extremely special guest, Damian Brady. Welcome Damian. Thanks good to be here
good to have you back now from the other side so tell everyone what you've been up to in the
last few months. Yeah so yes in about June of 2021 I moved from Microsoft to GitHub mainly
to follow a lot of the devops stuff that was happening and so I'm now in the DevRel team
at GitHub focusing on all things GitHub but one of the more recent things that happened that
you might have seen is GitHub Universe where we made a whole bunch of announcements it's kind of
GitHub's first party major event think Build or Ignite yeah so I was going to show you a bunch of
stuff from from Universe but um yeah that's mainly what I've been doing for the last little while.
That's awesome and there were a ton of announcements from GitHub Universe and I know
from the community there's a lot of stuff that they wanted to see that actually got launched and
I think there's more coming down the pipeline but if you could take it away and tell us about some
of the really cool stuff that came out at GitHub Universe that would be awesome. Yeah absolutely
so I'll make sure that we get all the links to the blog post that Thomas Dohmke put in his blog post
about all the stuff that's in Universe there's too many to kind of go through and show but I want
to highlight a couple that are really you know important to me especially so the biggest thing
for me I think is the updates to GitHub Issues and Projects and the whole planning and tracking side
that's been worked on for a while and there's a lot of teams around the world who are using
it as their daily driver for managing their work. That's now in public beta so you can
just try that out yourself. It's you know part of GitHub and it's a great way to manage your
projects whether they're open source or internal kind of enterprise projects as well. So I want
to show you some of that um I want to just touch just before we do that maybe touch on
a couple of the other things that have come out that I'm not going to talk so much about
we've done a lot of work on GitHub discussions there's some new stuff around CICD with actions
you might have seen over the last year things with environments and deployments and and all of that
side that's really cool there's some brand new stuff around ephemeral runners which basically
means when a job gets queued you can spin up a runner and then tear it down again so we kind
of fire off events that let you do that just for single jobs which is which is really handy.
Code Spaces I am going to talk about there's some stuff around security as well so code scanning we
now support ruby. Copilot is now open for people to use as well so no more waitlist you can just
go and try it out just grab the extension for VS code and and use that but yeah Issues is the first
thing i kind of want to show and then Code Spaces. I might jump into that a little bit as well.
Yeah awesome, I have had the great opportunity to play with Issues I'm really excited about it
because it's a feature that for lack of a better phrase was missing from from GitHub andI think
it's a it's a big game changer so go ahead take it away for us and show us some Issues.
Yeah absolutely so I've got my this is my little project I don't actually have a startup idea yet
but I figure that's the last thing you need to worry about. This is my billion dollar
startup and I've already gone ahead and kind of created this grid view I guess or table view
and you can see the different views that you can have. There's a table view and there's
a board view so I could easily just kind of switch that to the board view and then
it'll sort it by status. You know we've got our to-do in progress done you get all your normal
stuff like dragging them around and being able to manage you can see your tags oh sorry your labels
you can also kind of you know rename it you can sort, you can group, you can filter,
you can change what appears in there as well. So I've got the title assignees labels status there's
also some hidden ones so I could put the milestone on there or the other thing is these Issues
are across repositories so it's really handy in organizations where you might have multiple repos
where people are doing work across multiple repositories. I could add items so let's
just switch back to the table view it's a little bit easier and I'll add an item for a different
repository. So this is my billion dollar startup but let's say I wanted to do like something in
my equipment repository and say oh the green screen is super important for this project
so that belongs to a different repository and a different set of issues um but I can
put it all in here. One of the really new things that's come out as well is I can add a new field
and there's a new type called iteration so what we found is you could always kind of do this
just having like a text column as a custom column but um people tended to use iterations as like a
first-class citizen it's great for managing your scrum projects or just agile projects
so I could have this iteration starting on particular dates and then you know how long
they go for and create these iterations and manage things that way as well
so like there's tons of stuff to show you in here one other really good thing
is workflows based on um what's happening in your project as well so for example when a
issue is closed set the status to that card to done or yeah if a code review is approved maybe
I can do something else you know and so this is this is all being worked on these workflows but
it's an awesome way to kind of manage you know that that board and that grid and things like
that. I think this is this is awesome this is one probably for me one of the biggest features I've
seen come out of GitHub Universe this year. That was highly anticipated how we organize you know
our agile practices have visibility into it end to end spanning repos is something that Iprobably
get asked like several times a week how do we do that in Azure Devops et cetera and to see that
come all out off the gate awesome that's really cool definitely um and like there's a lot more
coming with this they're doing they're actively working on this constantly so if you start to use
it have a look and and try it out and give us some feedback on on how it's working for you.
Yeah yeah that's so cool that's really really cool I'm so excited to work with it um I have a project
coming up we're going to be in stating projects and blogging about it so I'm super excited that
it's out and uh we can share with the public now. Yeah definitely um one one quick thing if you
want to actually set these up if you go to your organizations it's at the organization level so
I'll just find it I actually here are my organizations I'm looking at Damovisa,Inc.
and so in settings I clicked the wrong button did I nope projects there we go so these are the
settings for projects so you can enable it for the organization for specific repositories and
things like that or um and I'll just go to the url because I know it orgs and then projects.
And you can see there's still the old project so if you wanted to use existing projects that's
still there or projects beta is the one that you want to look at as well so really easy to kind of
get started with this as well. Yeah really cool awesome awesome awesome. So show us what's next,
what else came out what's what's awesome what's cool. Yeah what do you have for us? The bit that's
really like honestly it's changed the way I work and I'm gonna say I thought this was a
gimmick when it first came out was the I don't know if whether you've seen the gifs and things
like that of people pressing the dot key. Yep, on a repository. I honestly when I first saw it
I thought it's a bit gimmicky people aren't going to do that I use it all the time like seriously
what it essentially is I'm just going to hit dot now so you can see in real time how long it takes
what it really is. It's just like a headless or a serverless kind of VS code for your 4a repository.
It's a little bit more than that though so I mean I can absolutely just edit stuff
in here so I could this is just a little haiku project I can make a change um and you know
submit a pull request if I don't have access so I don't have access to that repo but because I do
I'm an owner I can just commit that change and do it directly so for small changes that don't
require me to kind of compile or debug or anything like that. This is an awesome way of doing it
but I mentioned it's a little bit more than that as well there's a really cool
um feature in here where if you go to a pull request and let's see if we have one in here no
I'm just going to go to a different repository that I know has a pull request so um this one
there's some closed pull requests but I'll do that anyway let's reopen one of these just so i
can show it if I'm reviewing a pull request so this is a pull request that somebody submitted
if I'm reviewing that and I hit dot on this pull request page when I'm not focused on a um
and an entry field I'll get the same thing so I'll get VS code kind of a um web editor but I'm in the
context of this pull request so it's not just modifying the code now. Here's the pull request
that the person made um they literally yeah made this change themselves and I can review it
directly in here in that kind of context that I'm used to um so really really handy. Yeah it's it's
just so useful um that's kind of the thing that's available immediately for basically any repository
so you can do that um right now and I would strongly encourage you to do it
the other thing though that's worth showing I think is if you do need to compile and do need
to debug and that's Code Spaces so I've set one up ahead of time but you can do a new code space
um and just create it directly from a repository if you have access. I'm just going to open this
one because it'll be a tiny bit quicker not a lot quicker um one of the things that we
mentioned at Universe was that the entire we've basically moved the entire GitHub development team
to code spaces for GitHub so github.com so what you see when you get to github.com and everybody
uses Code Spaces from zero to a brand new Code Space ready to code ready to do work is about 10
seconds now and that's all our dependencies. It's this virtual machine that you can use
debug and run and all that kind of stuff just as you would so this is now VS Code
I've got a terminal you know I can I can run everything this is all running on the cloud
but through my browser or I could open this VS code locally and yeah I can I can debug
this application it's running in the cloud it's running node and it'll take a second to spin up um
but it's I can debug this thing without having to install anything on my local machine which
means I can do this from my desktop or I could do it from an ipad in a coffee shop
and I think we see a lot of people so like when I was in engineering working with customers we had a
lot of the developers and the engineering teams we worked with at customer sites didn't have access
to their machines they were locked down um if they tried to run any kind of dev container they were
like super locked down took a while to run Code Space has made all of that set up time like nil
so seeing this get even more you know resources and time and and insights put
into it's but also because we we use a lot of customers um it's portable and again like it
doesn't matter where you're working in the world it's also a secure development environment like
it's so so cool so they've done a really good job in making that like you're right easy to spin up
in about 10 seconds your whole development environment um absolutely love it because I
remember the first my first job this is decades ago when I started in software development it
took me like a week to get a computer at the time but then when I got one it was like another week
to get all the stuff set up on the computer the dependencies and then if I change project midway
through like you can burn a few days just getting everything straight if you're using Code Spaces
you just go to that other repository and create a Code Space and it's configured for that repository
for that you know piece of work for that project it's yeah it's honestly it's a game changer um
and one that I thought this might be a little bit gimmicky but uh seriously once I've started using
it and once we've started using it internally it's just changed the world basically absolutely and I
think gives every every engineer every developer the same development environment so I mean I work
on teams with you know half half the people have macs half the people of windows devices
for running a dev container setting up a dev container is great but it has its problems
locally on windows machines the whole change in licensing to um docker desktop like all of it's
kind of like throwing some things through loop so now same thing we're just using uh Code Spaces and
it's so easy to use it is yeah so I've put lots and lots of work into it um yeah it's awesome it's
great I'm fussing about this but um I've been able to dig into it a little bit lately and there'll
be another link I can give you as well um I did a couple of sessions at Universe on Codespaces
and there's a couple a couple more as well in there as well so if you want to have a
look at it um put the link in that'd be great I think our viewers would love that as well.
Cool Damian that was awesome there were some amazing updates that came out of Github Universe
I think Github has delivered so many cool features moving forward with security you know productivity
just all these things that we've kind of been waiting for and getting Chinese whispers about
so it's great to see him come to fruition yeah absolutely oh it's been exciting to work on
well thanks for coming back onto The Devops Lab it's been great to kind of reverse the roles
and host you on um please don't be a stranger and come back on and show some more cool Github stuff.
Yeah absolutely will thanks for having me all right thanks everyone and tune in next time
for potentially some more Github stuff with Damian!