GitHub 30 Minutes to Merge, 30 Sep 2021

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From YouTube: Special Projects at GitHub

Description

@jasonetco from GitHub’s special projects team, the team is focused on making an impact, helping users work faster, and improving the developer experience.

0:00 - Start
4:56 - Jason's developer journey from intern to Senior Software Engineer
6:24 - Intro to Special Projects at GitHub
9:00 - How to make your first GitHub Action
10:31 - How to build it
16:31 - Adding support for citations on GitHub
21:12 - A framework for building Open Graph images
25:40 - How do I get my feedback to the GitHub developer experience team?

https://github.com/actions/github-script
https://github.com/actions/toolkit
https://github.blog/2021-06-22-framework-building-open-graph-images/
https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions
https://github.community/t/30-minutes-to-merge-devops-with-jasonetco/200447

https://githubuniverse.com

A

What's going on.

B

A

Right, hello, hello and uh welcome to yet another 30 minutes to merge. If this is the first time you've joined us. uh Welcome for the first time I guess and if you've returned again and again and again uh welcome, welcome, welcome and thanks for continuing to watch me uh struggle to get through these. While I have awesome guests to kind of prop me up uh today, I'm super excited uh because I'm introducing jason ebco as my guest.

A

He is an awesome, github, um I've known uh jason since he started as github as an intern when he joined my team yeah exactly and then our paths kind of diverged, and then today I got to hang out with him uh with everyone else uh on the internet. So it's an exciting day for me um so really quickly.

A

I just wanted to introduce jason to uh the rest of the squad, because you might not know him as well as I do, um but when jason isn't uh chopping down, trees or mining stone in new worlds, uh he's also working on his cooking skills and he predominantly likes to kind of mess around with curry, which isn't always it's always a delicious meal. um He is the owner of one amazing kitty cat named mookie, and uh I always like to ask my guests what their most recent purpose is.

A

Just because I like to show that we are still people and buy random things, not just fun tech stuff, and uh he recently bought an eight-inch frying pan uh to make it a little bit easier for himself to cook eggs at breakfast time, which maybe some of you can relate to.

B

I used it not 20 minutes ago. It was very.

A

Helpful there it is there, it is see so that purchase came in in handy and then um I always like to ask if there's like a fun action that these individuals that are joining my show uh would like to build, and um so he's kind of actually in the process of working on one. He said that he's hesitantly building uh kind of actions as an arbitrary data layer um yeah. So do you want to kind of dive into that just a little bit in terms of like what this fun little action is.

B

Yes, uh so it's been a a hot minute since I've actually touched it, but I very hesitantly worked on a project called action record which, if you're familiar with ruby on rails, the sort of primary orm database communication stuff is called active records play on words.

B

An action record is an attempt at making an api for using github as a database via issues but with the actual sort of orm style um model, callbacks uh actually being run in github actions, uh and I wanna make it very clear that it's a terrible idea and it's sort of just a like. Could it work? Is it useful um really more of it? Just could it work, and the answer is kinda.

A

All right, and then finally, I like to ask my guests: um well, if they're contributing to open source or if they'd like to be contributing more, um and you said that you do maintain a couple of open source projects, kind of, uh as as requests start to filter in you kind of like go back to those different open source projects that you are maintaining um yep and then outside of yours uh or the ones that you're kind of maintaining uh you do want to become more involved uh with open source outside of your projects.

A

uh You just haven't necessarily found the right project uh and or found the the motivation to really get up and running. So if chad has any open source repos uh that you're looking.

B

For contributor.

A

On hit up jason because he's he is fiending for an open source project to work on, uh and then there was a question in chat about is there is, if there's anything that they would be able to contribute in um we'll, we can share a link to all of the different repositories uh that jason um is maintaining. So if you wanted to kind of take a gator, what he's working on like the uh actions as a data layer um or maybe some.

B

Of the other actions.

A

That jason um is kind of known, for uh we can make sure that those are kind of shared. So you can take a gander, yeah, um okay, so today's a little different, normally on 30 minutes to merge we kind of cover, um like maybe a specific topic, uh or maybe a specific task, uh but today we're going to actually kind of be talking about what jason does at github uh and the team that he works on um so yeah so like.

A

Maybe you could give us an introduction as to like your journey at github and then what your current team is.

B

Yeah so, uh like you mentioned, uh I started at github as an intern about four and a half years ago, which is kind of ridiculous. To think about.

B

uh I started on the sales services training team so helping to build out websites and marketing materials and stuff like that, for our professional services team, who are, of course, consultants kind of they go to enterprises and really help them understand how to use github use it the best way that they can integrate with all their different tools and stuff, and then eventually, we sort of I spun out into a new team to build something called github learning lab, which is a sort of an automated training solution that happens within github repositories.

B

You can go and sign up. You say I want to join this course and then a bot creates a repository for you and sort of takes you along these guided steps so that you can learn how to use things like github or issues or markdown and sort of all of the things that encapsulate the experience of github.com or github enterprise software development life cycles, and this spot kind of just like brings you along on the journey.

B

So I worked on that for a good. I don't know two three years and then eventually, I moved into a team called special projects. uh Special projects is a fairly new team. At github uh we sort of have two main areas. We work on paper cuts so sort of uh low effort, high impact improvements that we can make across the product. So you know somebody will write in and say gee whiz.

B

I hope I could store this setting or uh I wish that this button were on the left instead of the right that sort of lower level of paper cuts fixes that we can make and then all the way up to some sort of more complicated things which I can show you some examples of uh we're kind of the team that does it all across the product and part of why special projects exist is that there are areas of the product like take github issues.

B

For example, there is a team that works on github issues and they're. Thinking about you know the next five years of how people interact with issues on github, they're thinking about you know the biggest best amazing things that they can deliver to people that use github, which means that they can't always prioritize the very sort of nitpicky fixes.

B

um So, thankfully, that's what we get to help do and then the other kind of work we do. Is these sort of larger explorations uh a lot of it comes from somebody saying hey what? If we did this thing, you know what, if github, I don't know was or what, if github had a mobile app, it does.

B

But let's imagine that it didn't that's the kind of prompt that our team would say. Oh hmm what an interesting idea. Let's spend sixish weeks building out whatever kind of prototypes, we can doing a bunch of research trying to understand the problem. Space and just you know, spend some time finding a solution.

B

At the end of six weeks, we present a bunch of research, we present some prototypes and then we sort of take it from there. If it's a good idea, we keep going. If it's not, we stop, uh and I can also show you some examples of when we've done that perfect.

A

I'm sure people are very curious. What kind of like exploratory things you kind of dove in dope into uh and then you know what's come out of it um really quickly. um So I did want to bring up one question because we do normally try to. You know, tackle a specific task or.

B

A

What someone might want to learn how to do with github, um so I thought it would be fun to just like a really quick, like maybe two or three minutes. um If someone came to you and said hey, I just found out about github actions. I want to write one um like what would you ex what would you tell that person? What are some areas that you would kind of provide with guidance uh docs? Maybe um essentially, what would you tell someone that was like? I want to make an action for the first time.

B

Yeah totally so that's a great question: there's a lot of different ways that you can approach it. The first thing I would say is make sure that you're understanding the ins and outs of whatever kind of automation tool you want to build right.

B

If you can sort of phrase it in a way. That's when this thing happens. I want this other thing to happen. um If you can very clearly write out that statement for yourself, it's going to help you a lot because then you can go from there and sort of say what are the triggers?

B

What information do I have in this context, and then what are the apis or what are the different services that I need to talk to to be able to connect those two? You know sides of that statement and when it comes to github actions, that's usually what are the triggers that can trigger a github action and then what are the github apis that you know my action has access to. So I think you really need to spend a lot of time.

B

Reading the documentation uh actions has great docs around which events it supports and then the entire api reference documentation for the github api is available. So that's the sort of like conceptual part of it. Then how do you actually approach building it? Well, there's really one way that I start thinking about: building a github actions workflow and that's first things. First, I make a yaml file and then I go to github.com actions, slash github dash script, so this is a github action called github script.

B

um I can I have it open. I don't know how to share my screen, but it's open on my screen. Yeah. Thank you. So this is a github action uh where, basically, you include it in your workflow yaml file and you just sort of give it a string. You give it this script and that string is just javascript with some sort of helper methods and helper variables that exist within the context of that script.

B

So traditionally actions if you want to do something really complicated. If you want to write javascript for your action, if you want to make api calls and stuff like that, it's usually easier to like build an entire action as a repository, but for a lot of use cases, if all you want to do is like add a label to all new issues or anytime. An issue is closed, move it to the done column right stuff, like that.

B

You can usually just get away with it in your workflow file directly using something like github script.

B

So if you can sort of keep it that simple, you save yourself a lot of trouble now, if that doesn't work, if what you're doing is more involved, you know you need dependencies, you need, I don't know additional secrets um or some like larger, more complicated action with a bunch of files and stuff. Then you have to have a proper github action. As a repository, I've seen a lot of folks create one repository for a bunch of different actions. Personally, I prefer to have multiple repos one for each action.

B

uh It helps as far as publishing them to the marketplace, making sure that they're all sort of well tested and well isolated and including them properly in the workflow files.

B

um But I think the key thing is that as you're developing your github action, there's a couple of sdks and toolkits that you can use uh there's an official one, so github github.com actionslash toolkit.

A

Jason, while you're exploring, can you just zoom in just a little bit.

B

I absolutely can how's that thanks yep yeah, so uh we have here the github actions toolkit, so it's sort of an sdk for dealing with github actions within your javascript or typescript action. So it helps you manage things like uh getting the inputs that people provide to your action. So you know anybody who's using your action can uh provide some. You know options or configurations or something like that to your action.

B

It's really just sort of apis to be more helpful as you're writing actions. I would never ever want to write a javascript based action without this and then I also wrote one called also actions toolkit um and it's a more opinionated sort of alternative, it's more batteries included, which is both good and bad. Depending on what you want, um but yeah. You can also check that out.

B

uh I also get a lot of questions about how you go about testing your github action as you're building it. That's like a very common thing that people want to know about, um and there's really two ways number one as you're building it. You have a test repository and you're, actually triggering events on github. In your test.

B

Repository running the action every time and seeing what the output is very manual process, but also very expectable, and you know, repositories are cheap, just make a new repo every time you need to test a new action, it's okay and then the other one is personally eileen very heavily into test driven development. When I build github actions because the github actions environment, in which my action will actually run, it includes things like environment variables.

B

um It includes things like uh the sdk for communicating with the github api and it's usually easier to just sort of have those as test fixtures.

B

The documentation, like I said for the api, is really really specific. They give you fixture payloads that you can even copy into your project so that.

A

As you build, it.

B

Out you're just sort of writing the tests. As you go.

A

B

Never actually have to run the action until you're done, and you say: okay, I think all of my code is correct. All of my tests look reasonable and they pass now. Let me actually try it.

B

That was a long rant, but I hope that made sense.

A

No, absolutely you kind of took this from beginning to end, which is perfect, um and hopefully people learned a little bit from it or at least got some new repositories to kind of poke around in. I know I'll be looking at those actions tool kits once I'm not on this, um so you did mention that your teams kind of shipped a couple of things, and you said that you wanted to share, and since uh you've got your screen already up, I figured we could.

B

A

Into some of the fun things that you've already built out.

B

Yes, I can so um like, I said, there's two sort of larger project work streams that we have and I want to show one of the paper cuts type issues that we tackled.

B

So we added support for citations on github, and if you look at this ui here, you can see a repository with a citation.cff file and now github will pick up on that existence of that file, and it will include this little uh ui flyout menu here, where you can very easily copy the citation of this repository.

B

So this is extremely valuable for folks who um are trying to cite a repository as part of like an academic paper or for students who are just you know, submitting papers and they need to cite open source code or open source. You know ideas and concepts, so this was one of those areas where you know we knew that people were going to be really happy about this, but when we released it, we just got an incredibly positive response.

B

So you know we don't always know what people are going to love, which is why our team so heavily depends on. You know listening to the community getting ideas from everybody that uses github because everybody uses it differently.

B

um I have never tried to cite a repository, but the people that wrote in thanking us for this feature say this is going to make their work a million times easier, which is really amazing um and then, aside from this, this is even like on the larger end of the paper cuts issues that we do.

B

um I think a favorite one that I have is you know when you're writing an issue title and you do like backtick for markdown code in the issue title itself.

B

uh Well, historically, you would do like you know this thing back tick, some code back tick and it would just stay as tactics in the you know in the github ui um and that's fine, but that's not really what people intended right. People wanted it to be rendered as code right monospace, with a little like gray background that you see everywhere on github when you're typing monospace code, uh and so that's that's what we did. We made it work that way and people were just like, oh cool.

B

Why didn't it always work that way uh and there's usually lots of good reasons, and it was actually a little bit complicated to do just because of everywhere that issue titles are rendered, but it's one of those things where you look at it and it's just like cool. This is good.

A

All right, so that's so that's some smaller things you have any more small ones that you want to share, or I was small, is the wrong word. I think the the paper cut specific, like shorter sprint, work, we'll say.

B

There's truly truly no end to them. um We we have a project board in which we list all of the various ones that we're tracking and it's just massive, and it grows every day. um One that I shipped a long time ago actually was a button to uh when you're looking at a diff in a pull request or a commit.

B

uh You have buttons to sort of show more of the diff up or down than the line that you're looking at right, because we only show a portion of the entire file that has changed.

B

So I worked on adding a button to show the entire file with just one click, instead of having to like click, to show more click, to show more click to show more. um So that was again one of those things where, like wasn't that hard to do, but made people's code review lives just a little bit easier got you.

A

um Okay, I know I saw one- I think that was uh you're now able to use autumn uh the auto link references via the api now, which I thought was fun uh yeah again, probably like a small subset of users who are like, oh finally, um but I know that I've been kind of waiting for that to be available, so that was that was exciting to see as an option as well.

B

A

That was also a really cool one.

B

That's kind of a fun thing about how this team operates is you know we just talked about effectively three different features that span the entire github product right, they're, not at all related the things that we just talked about, um which is just really interesting. You know our team jumps into all these problems or all of these you know product areas and just tries to make it a better experience.

B

Speaking of better experiences, uh I want to talk about uh one of the larger projects that we worked on, which was this framework for building open graph images.

B

um So there's a blog post here that I think somebody will link in the chat. I don't actually know how to do that, but somebody will um in which uh we go over this project that we did to sort of make social uh link sharing a way way better experience. So if we scroll down here, you see a very large picture of nat friedman, um and this is what it used to look like when people shared an image.

B

uh Sorry shared a link to a github repository or a github issue on a social media platform like twitter or facebook.

B

It would just be like this giant image of the person's avatar and that's not very exciting, so we took on this project to automatically generate images based on the link that was being shared. So in this example you know I would share a link to the nasa f prime repository.

B

We github would automatically generate this really nice preview card image and included in the actual card. So there should be there's no example here, but these are like some of the images that we show we have ones for commits. We have ones for pull requests and issues and now, instead of just sort of seeing you know, dull uninteresting text as you're scrolling through your twitter feed, you'll see these really nice rich images and every time I scroll through twitter, because I use twitter a lot.

B

I see more and more of these images and it's just such a better experience, and I love telling the story of how our team took on this project.

B

uh Nat friedman, our ceo, said something along the lines of this kind of sucks. Can we make it better and we said yeah yeah we can so we did so. I would definitely recommend reading through this blog post, I'm also going to be giving a talk, github universe in which I go much more in depth around what opengraph is how it works, the different kinds of tags that we github provide and also how we built this service even in more detail than what's shown here.

A

B

Think this is the most.

A

The the most links I've had to submit to chat in a 30 minutes to merge session. So, just if you are, if you aren't paying attention to chat, I just dumped like every um repository, every blog post and then a link to github universe um that we've kind of talked about so far today, um interest of time, I know it's like a 30 minute submerge and we're kind of cutting it close. um Did you have anything else that you wanted to mention about your team? I.

B

Did thank you so much for the segue.

A

uh So yeah, my team is hiring.

B

uh We're a group of I don't know seven eight kind of people and we're looking to really grow the team. uh Our work has been really successful so far and we just want to be able to do more of it, so we're hiring a senior software engineering manager, senior software engineers and a senior product manager.

B

I believe so you can find all of those on github.com about slash careers, there's another link for you and then, uh if anybody has questions about the roles, you're welcome to find me on twitter at jason, etco uh happy to answer any questions I can over dm's as well. um I look forward to hearing about it.

A

There's a question about internships, um so for the internship piece um you can sometimes find the internship information on that same website uh for the github careers page. There's a link directly for the internships and like how that process works. um I used to be plugged into that a little bit more than I am now.

A

um I've been involved with the internship program from like a high level just going to events if they were in the area but um since covet, I haven't really been, as involved with the internship program, but I know that we have one- um and I know that we normally have a class that you know does really cool things. They ship cool products and then you know sometimes they land a gig at github, which is always a great thing, um really quick.

A

um So you said that you kind of look to make sure that the developers are having a better experience. What's the best way for developers to tell your team uh what could be improved on github.

B

There's two three preferred ways uh that we see customer feedback uh on github.com, github feedback. uh There's a bunch of discussion posts that you can leave all kinds of comments, thoughts, ideas, those are really really helpful and we crawl through those all the time you can also tweet at github. We we follow the twitter accounts pretty closely.

B

um I see a lot of them on on there and, if they're not already on our project board, we all just dropped them there, it's extremely helpful and then the last one is we follow customer support emails when customers, you know chime in and say, hey. We need this thing, we're missing this feature. This thing didn't work for us. The way you expect it to we follow those.

B

So all that said, uh if you have an idea, if you have a paper cut, if you have this thing, that's just been bothering you if you say it out into the world in any of those three places or probably more, we will hear it and we want to hear it, and we want to hear from you.

A

Sorry I mean to disappear on you, I'm just again. I keep giving you links. I understand.

B

A

Yeah there's just like nine different links for every, like four words that you say so.

A

My internet browser is just full of repositories and, like the github uh careers page now um all right well, thank you. So much for joining um chat. We've got a couple of minutes.

A

So if you have any questions for jason uh about his team, the projects that uh they're working on um or anything else that you're curious about, we can hang out for a little bit um and if you don't have any questions now, you can always find us on the github community site, which I'm sure will be linked in on the stream for me, so I don't have to drop one more link where we normally have conversations uh related to using github and also kind of where this, this kind of stream kind of started from which was users having questions about how to use git and github and um andrea suckering me into hosting this awesome event.

A

So it's you know. I think this is the fourth or fifth time. I've done it still loving it every time, I'm learning a whole bunch about how to be a little bit better. Every time.

A

So awesome well again, thank you so much for joining uh jason. I appreciate it being able to catch up with you in a professional and personal manner on this one thanks.

B

A

Yeah and uh yeah, thanks for all the work that your team's doing, it's great to you know, have my work on github be improved a little bit.

B

Happy to do it, it's very fun.

A

All right well again, thank you all have a great rest of your day, uh whether it's morning, noon or night and uh we'll be catching you up next month. I think we have another. If I checked my calendar before I started this, I've got another 30 minutes to merge coming up next month, we'll be chit chatting with another awesome, octocat or maybe someone outside of github, but probably not and uh and don't forget, github universe is coming so make sure to sign up and, like jason said, his team is hiring.

A

My team is hiring, github is hiring so if you're interested jump in and find a gig, uh I'm on twitter, beardevu jason is at jason, epco feel free to reach out to either one of us. If you have questions um yeah, it's a great time to be a hubber.

B