This Is What Udacity’s Robotics Team Learned at GitHub Universe
We’ve profiled some of the most interesting and exciting talks, announcements, and new features we saw during the two-day conference
Early last week, the Udacity Robotics team attended the GitHub Universe conference at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. During the two-day conference and one-day hands-on workshop, GitHub demoed their latest features to developers from all around the world, who gathered to talk about code and to celebrate GitHub’s ten years of accomplishments. As a developer—particularly a Robotics Software Engineer—GitHub is the first tab you open in the morning and the last tab you close at night. It’s almost like your second home. So we were all naturally excited to come and see GitHub’s latest features. Some of the best workshops, sessions, and talks that impressed us are listed below:
Workshop: Build a GitHub App using Probot
This workshop focused on automating a repetitive task on GitHub. For example, let’s say you are working with an international team and are currently translating each issue on GitHub from English to French. With Probot, you can build a translator GitHub app, and connect it to any repo to automatically translate each and every incoming issue.
The presenters generously shared the workshop session on Github, check it out by clicking here.
New Feature Announced: GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions has finally arrived. Many developers were waiting for this feature to speed up their work. With GitHub Actions, developers will cut down the steps they usually take to build, run and deploy their code. This feature is compatible with any coding language. It offers a visual as well as a text editor tool that allows developers to connect multiple actions together. The power of this feature lies in running your actions in parallel! Wondering how you would benefit from GitHub Actions? As a developer, you can now deploy your code to five different clouds with the press of a button and visualize the progress of each action.
GitHub Actions is currently in Beta testing phase. Sign up to be one of the early testers of this cool new feature using this link!
Talk: Innersource at JPL — Building software like an open source community in a science, engineering, and research enterprise
NASA JPL was also present at GitHub Universe! They gave a talk that stressed the importance of contributing to open source projects to create a better tomorrow. NASA shared a build-it-yourself, scaled down version of the NASA Rover that is currently exploring the surface of Mars.
Check out the public repo here and build your scaled down version of the NASA Rover!
Learning with Udacity
If you’re interested in learning more about Git and GitHub, Udacity has put together a free How to Use Git and GitHub course. This course, built with input from GitHub, will introduce the basics of using version control by focusing on a particular version control system called Git and a collaboration platform called GitHub.
You can also take advantage of another free course hosted by Udacity to optimize your GitHub profile. The Optimize your GitHub free course by Grow with Goole teaches you how to build a GitHub profile to impress employers.
