GitHub Universe 2023 highlights

I have attended GitHub Universe 2023 conference in San Francisco again this year. It was a very well organized event with tons of exciting content, interesting people and meaningful discussions. I am glad I got an opportunity to attend this conference in person too as nothing beats face to face interactions with the old friends & colleagues as well as making new connections and meeting new friends. It was a fun event with a lot of exciting announcements. I’ll try to summarize some of my favourites:

• GitHub Copilot Enterprise bringing the power of GitHub Copilot to the enterprise world and, of course, it comes with enterprise-grade security, safety and privacy. GitHub Copilot Enterprise has all the features of GitHub Copilot Business PLUS it allows your teams of developers to quickly get up to speed on your codebase, search through and build documentation, get suggestions based on internal and private code, and quickly review pull requests. Additionally, smart actions, such as the ability to generate pull request summaries, will be available throughout GitHub helping developers stay in their flow state with the click of a button. Excellent productivity tool for every day enterprise shops. Available in February 2024. Price $39 user/month. Requires GitHub Enterprise Cloud. Can’t wait.
• GitHub Copilot can now generate detailed PR descriptions with a single click. Gone are the days when I’m trying to come up with meaningful description to my PRs. This simple feature will not only save me precious time and improve my productivity, but also help my teammates to understand my PRs better. This is an amazing feature. Thank you, GitHub Copilot for making my job easier!
• New code scanning autofix designed to help developers introduce fixes more quickly. These AI-generated fixes apply to CodeQL, JavaScript and TypeScript alerts received in pull requests. This will radically transforms the traditional definition of “shift left.”
• Custom models (BETA) of GitHub Copilot Enterprise allows open things up to all manner of AI-enabled conversations around your custom codebase and associated documentation in the cloud. But more than that, companies can fine-tune the model so that Copilot is better enabled to complete code and answer very specific questions that are unique to a given codebase.
• Now you can switch between personal and professional GitHub handles effortlessly, enhancing collaboration and productivity. This is definitely a welcomed addition.
• AI powered secret scanning is making it easier to find leaked secrets with low false positives rates.
• New regular expression generator certainly makes my life easier because I no longer have to go through regex pain of trying to build proper regex expressions.
• GitHub will be extending GitHub Copilot Enterprise beyond your code editor to github.com and mobile devices. “With Copilot Chat connected to your repositories on GitHub.com, Copilot Enterprise allows your teams of developers to quickly get up to speed on your codebase, search through and build documentation, get suggestions based on internal and private code, and quickly review pull requests” said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.
• The new, larger GitHub-hosted runners make scaling simple and secure with multi-platform, fully managed, and auto-scaled hosted runners. In addition, GitHub now offers Apple Silicon powered M1 macOS larger runners as well as ARM based hosted runners. More power, more options. Can’t wait to use it.
• Another notable announcement from GitHub Universe is the Copilot Partner Program, which will see GitHub foster relationships with the broader developer community. This will come in the form of plug-ins built by third-party developer tooling companies, such as Datastax, LaunchDarkly, Postman, HashiCorp and Datadog, which are building integrations for Copilot. This will supercharge GitHub Copilot functionality by integrating it with third-party developer tools, online services, and knowledge outside GitHub.
• GitHub also gave an early look at what the company is calling Copilot Workspace, which it says serves as a “natural language bridge” for developers to go from idea to running code in just a few minutes.Set for a 2024 launch, Copilot Workspace will enable seamless code creation through natural language and AI. Not really sure what that would look like yet, but it certainly sounds exciting…
• While technically Repository Properties have been available for some time, it’s worth mentioning this feature anyways. Repository Properties allow you to configure (and enforce) custom metadata properties (for example, information such as compliance frameworks, data sensitivity, or project details) for your new and existing GitHub repositories. But that’s just half the benefits. The beauty is that you can use those properties to target repositories with Repository Rulesets to control how people can interact with branches and tags in a repository.

Hope this was helpful. See you at GitHub Universe 2024.

#DevOps Guy