GitHub GitHub Checkout, 23 Nov 2020

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: GitHub Mobile Applications for Managing Your GitHub Repositories On The Go - GitHub Checkout

Description

Show notes
GitHub Mobile applications have some very useful features for managing your GitHub repositories on the go, such as reviewing pull requests, adding comments, and browsing open-source projects. In this video, we talk through the history of the GitHub mobile apps, and show a demo of some of the key features.

0:00 - start
6:30 - demo

Mobile apps docs:
https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/getting-started-with-github/github-for-mobile

Download apps:
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/github/id1477376905
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.android&hl=en_US&gl=US

Blog - Even better code review in GitHub for mobile
https://github.blog/2020-10-14-even-better-code-review-in-github-for-mobile/

iOS beta testing: https://testflight.apple.com/join/NLskzwi5

Submit app feature requests: https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions?discussions_q=category%3A%22Mobile+Feedback%22

Hesham Salman:
GitHub - https://github.com/Iron-Ham
Twitter - https://twitter.com/_ironham

Sasha Rosenbaum:
GitHub - https://github.com/DivineOps
Twitter - https://twitter.com/DivineOps

As always, feel free to leave us a comment below and don't forget to subscribe: http://bit.ly/subgithub

Thanks!

Connect with us.
Facebook: http://fb.com/github
Twitter: http://twitter.com/github
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/company/github

About GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Millions of people use GitHub to build amazing things together. For more info, go to http://github.com

A

Hi I'm sasha rosemaum, and this is github checkout. Today we're going to talk about the github mobile applications and my guest today is hashem salman hasham. Would you like to introduce yourself.

B

Absolutely yeah, so my name is hasham and I am uh I'm an engineer at github working on the github mobile projects.

B

um Primarily I work on ios, but I also work on android from time to time um and I was actually the first mobile hire at github, and so I am really excited to be talking to you all today about the github app.

A

This is really incredible, so I know github has kind of an unconventional history and you were there since the very beginning. Would you like to tell us a little bit about that.

B

Absolutely um so the github mobile app story actually starts with an open source project called github.

B

Github is a an open source community project and it started off as a way to leverage this other open source project called ig list kit, which is authored by instagram, um and we started building uh github largely for ourselves, and so we focused on the the niche use cases that we had uh that were important to us at the time. um So that's things like notifications and you know managing issues, and you know peeking at a pr uh and pretty quickly the projects just sort of gained a life of its own.

B

um You know we had contributors, kind of popping up and and just contributing features that they wanted to use as well, um and so it was really a community driven project and the community really powered the development and the direction of the app. While we were working on it.

A

That's really cool because, usually from experience, you actually need to invest quite a bit to grow the open source community around the project. But this was one of the cases where people showed up and wanted to contribute. You know- and it just shows that there was an actual need for the application and that a lot of people were interested in it.

A

So, um a couple of weeks ago, we actually talked about the progre, the journey of getting the github docs from being close source to open source and can the challenges that we face along that journey, um and this sounds almost like an opposite story. I mean we didn't close source the app, but it we did to accept it into the github family. So how was that experience.

B

Well, joining github officially was like the best possible outcome for this project. um While we were an open source, you know third party app. um We had to make a lot of hacks around the public api and we had to get really creative with with our limitations.

B

um One of the things I think about a lot is the way that we built push notifications for github.

B

um Since we didn't have you know: official access to github.com and the uh github.com like web page and the back end and the apis there we kind of hacked around it by holding uh the api a lot, and so, at the end of the day, it wasn't very reliable and it only kind of like worked.

B

Sometimes so one of the big benefits of of becoming an official first party app is that we can make new apis and you know, use the the existing private ones and make them public uh and we can build first class features on top of that. Like push notifications, um additionally, like you know, joining github allowed the product to be exposed to so many more people.

B

You know we had. We had a good number of people using the app when it was open source, but you know now that we're an official app we have so many more users, and that means getting so much more feedback and making changes based on based on that feedback.

B

A

That sounds really cool, so if I'm new and I have never used the mobile app before what can I do with the app actually.

B

You know when we, when we first launched, uh which I think was actually maybe in march, so it wasn't even that long ago, when we first launched you could do a little bit but not a whole lot, but today you can do so so so much so you can do everything from triage. Your notifications, uh that's marking things as read and done and saved.

B

uh You can interact with a lot of our social features at github, that's following users and checking out the trending repositories and recommended repositories for you. um You can merge your pull requests and you can leave detailed reviews and suggestions for those pull requests.

A

Which sounds good, I can be on vacation in my lawn chair. Reviewing portal requests absolutely.

B

And you know what we.

A

Actually, have.

B

Had people uh you know floating.

A

Down the amazon.

B

River, while reviewing code so.

A

I mean I, I recommend floating down the amazon river while focusing on the amazon river. But if you really, you know, I heard there's piranhas there. I don't know, but if you really needed to review a pr on your mobile phone, you could totally absolutely do that. um So are there any new features that we recently released that you would like to talk about.

B

We we recently uh put out a pretty big release that was focused on code review, and you know what we, what we worked on, primarily one of the biggest asks that that users had was that they didn't want their code to wrap uh when they're when they're reading code, um the the the distinction between what one line and another line is pretty difficult. If you know a single line takes up a lot of vertical vertical lines, and so we we allowed the users to turn off line wrapping.

B

Additionally, we introduced the ability to customize the way that you want to merge. So you don't you don't have to you know just make a merge commit. You can also make squash commit and you can rebase and you can leave custom messages.

B

um We also added support for suggested changes and the ability to jump to specific files in a really big pr. So, overall, I think we really improved the uh the code review experience.

A

Nice that, oh sounds good. Do you want to show us any of that.

B

um Absolutely yeah, let me let me get this demo up, so this is the this. Is the home screen of the github mobile app on a relatively new user? um This user has a favorite repository that they tend to work in and I can click into it to check out. What's going on, when I step into this repository, I can see that there are two pull requests and so let's go check those out.

B

So this is a pull request made by my my primary user. Where I have um it looks like I have added. uh You know a new file with two lines.

B

Looking at this code, um it looks fine to me. uh I'm gonna leave a little comment on this one, and this one we're just gonna leave a little multi-line.

B

B

So we can send that comment and then finalize our review.

A

I love reviewing my own commits. Oh.

B

Yeah yeah me too: it's uh the the approval process is so.

B

Easy so this actually looks good to go to me, and so we can give it a merge. So I'm going to go ahead and change this to rebase and merge all right and let her rip.

A

Nice, so we just did all that from a mobile, app yeah.

B

Pretty pretty amazing, um very cool. We also have the ability to check out um to basically dive specifically anywhere into into github.com from from the explore page um so from here. You know you can check out uh feature repositories and what's trending right now, but you can also go ahead and jump to any pr or issue anywhere on github.

B

So you could check out this react pr.

B

And you can check out individual files in this react pr by just hitting this button and then jumping to the file that you care about.

A

That's so very cool, so I can get to any open source project on github and just jump in into reviewing a commit. If I wanted to and stuff like that, that's amazing.

B

Absolutely we're we're still building a ton of new features and we're listening pretty heavily to user requests. So if, if there is something that you know, users want on github, all you have to do is is reach out to us, and we will, we will see about. You know prioritizing it.

A

Yeah, so um let's leave the best ways to reach out to github regarding the mobile app in the show notes for this video and also um if I wanted to start get started with the mobile app today. What's the best way to get started.

B

So the best way to get started today would be to go to the ios, app store or the google play store and just give it a download. But that's assuming that you already have a github account.

B

If you don't have an account, then the best way would be to make one on github.com and then give it a download.

A

And since we know that everyone has a github account, then we're all good. We got that stuff covered right. um So all right, thank you, hasham for building the mobile apps for us, and also thank you for being here with me today. This has been getupcheckout and click subscribe for more videos like this. Thank you and bye.