GitHub Open Source Friday, 23 Oct 2020

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From YouTube: Take GitHub to the command line - GitHub CLI

Description

You can now use the GitHub API to script almost any action, and set a custom alias for any command. Work with issues, pull requests, checks, releases, and more.

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A

Thank you good morning.

B

All right yeah, so this is uh folks if you is the first time you're here, maybe the first time you actually sort of strolled through either twitter or a meetup page. uh This is open source friday and uh it's an opportunity to talk to maintainers and learn how open source works um or how what how open source doesn't work too, as well. We're happy to have both conversations and um if you are in the chat to say hello, um definitely give us a wave. um Tell us how you learned about this. uh The stream.

B

Also, if you've been here before, just uh give us a shout out and say you know I came in for this project or I came in for this other stream. um But nate uh do you want to give us like an introduction of who you are and what you do and uh what project you're working on.

A

Sure yeah, um uh so uh my name is nate uh everywhere online, I'm building a bim, um I usually say my name is film a bim. I just play an avatar called nate elsewhere, um but I I work for github. I've worked there for almost three years um and I work on gh. So gh is the command line. Version of github.com.

B

Excellent and uh it sounds like uh the notification was in spanish too as well. I totally forgot to change that. uh We had the octogothos conf, so it was a conference in espanol. um So if anybody was was uh confused on why that was in spanish and they didn't understand it, there you go. um This present ten day is uh uh going to be presented in english.

B

That was horrible, but uh we'll we'll move on to it. um I know I know a bit of spanish, but not not great, um oh yeah, you've. Actually, um you actually started to get around the same time. We just learned that before we went, live uh and you've been working, so you haven't always been working on the cli. Then you were we working on before.

A

Oh, it's super exciting. uh Well, so before github I worked for venmo, uh oh nice, it just happened by accident kind of like I. I wanted three trips to new york and I was like one of the python companies in new york so ended up at venmo, uh but then that puts the the taint of fintech on your resume yeah, and so when I was looking for a new job, uh my girlfriend is actually a hover. um She's been here um almost four years, oh cool uh and I was just getting jealous.

A

I was like wow, it looks like a pretty sweet place to work. I've been a user of github forever and they had an opening for billing, so um so yeah. So you know, thanks to the finances, I got a job, uh doing uh working on payments um like enterprise, side of payments um and uh yeah, but when you know when the cli team got formed, like the second I heard about it, I was like like this is the team that I I want to be on.

A

um So I went to the manager and just kind of showed her. All of my my adventures in the terminal that I go on, and here I am now.

B

Awesome, cool yeah, that's one of the programming things, there's two things: I don't want to do in programming, one's time zones and the other one is billing. um I've had experience of both of them and I've sworn them off. So if I have to touch you know the braintree api or other things like I'm, just like you know what uh I'm gonna either offload this to somebody else or, like politely, bow out, but um definitely definitely a hard problem, and I totally get the whole um containing your resume with the with the finance fintech.

B

uh Definitely a thing you get sort of sort of like typecasting and when it comes to like movie stars, you've escaped though you're not working on a nice cool, open source tool uh which is gh. I'm a.

A

Lot happier yeah definitely.

B

uh I'm curious, though your background uh is in python, then.

A

uh It's yeah it's kind of all over um I you know I've been doing programming for like probably 12 12 years, or something like that. uh I've, like by the bulk of my code, has been python, um but for jobs it's been a been a really weird. Like a weird mix. My career started in pearl. um You know, so I have a big big soft spot for pearl. Still. uh I've done closure, ruby, um java, all sorts of stuff, but yeah outside of work. It was pretty much python for for a long time.

A

I had a weird like couple of years, the javascript person um and uh now actually because of gh I've gotten really into go. So I've been like porting all of my side, stuff in the go and it's been all fun.

B

Nice, so you're you're, is that your first experience, though, with go, is from uh this project.

A

Pretty my first, like you know real experience, um I had started a a project and go well. I tried to learn rust like a couple years ago and it went terribly and I was like well I'll fail and to go, and so I was already learning it when I heard about this team, um but I had only done like some toy projects and really small stuff. So this is my first like you know, actual project and go.

B

Okay, awesome, uh I I've always been interested in go um ironically, my last job I interviewed and go, but when I got there I wrote only javascript. um So it's a it's a it's a story. I tell all the time but yeah, that's my I've always like been tangential to go projects. So when I saw the cli was written in go and I was using it for my own streams, I used the cli um had an opportunity for a feature and then saw it was written and go. I'm like oh. This is awesome.

B

I can actually use the all the knowledge I do, which I joke. I learned go once a year um just to keep up the up to speed.

A

I I've been really happy with it. It's like uh moving, I don't know for whatever reason I found it really weirdly intuitive and the parts about it that were weird. I got really used to it now. I really appreciate- and it's just been great- I I'm I'm so happy. I don't have to think about virtual environments and packaging and python versions, and I didn't expect that to be one of my favorite things, but uh it's really cool to be like.

A

I can write a little script, compile it, and I just have that now I don't have to like do maintenance on my little scripts. You know, which is what has been happening over the years with my python stuff.

B

All right so we're getting uh some comments about the the buffering and the lagging I just lowered the bitrate, so hopefully, that sort of gives us a little more space and lowers the lag I apologize for folks, who are not getting the best experience. uh Perhaps you're on the twitch is not leveraging the local aws server for them um disable low, latency mode.

B

That is something that I definitely don't know how to do, um but I will say the recording will be on on youtube. So if you cannot stick around for this, um do the buffering uh feel free to check it out on the youtube and we'll still continue to power through it's, uh you know we're doing it live uh so speaking of live, I can switch to the the share and we can actually jump into the project and talk about what we actually been sort of alluding to, which is the uh the actual cli itself.

B

So we had a big release. uh Was it uh last week or the week before.

A

Oh, my god time is incredibly meaningless. uh Two weeks ago was the big 1.0 yeah.

B

Yeah- and uh so do you want to give like, uh we can give like a brief overview of like what the cli is and like why it exists.

A

Yeah sure um I mean the way that I describe it is it's it's a port of github. uh You know like between video game consoles kind of it's. We have it on the web, and now we have it in the terminal. So it's it's more than just um like an api wrapper. um I know there's a lot of. There are many really cool projects um out there that just kind of like wrap all the api endpoints.

A

um So this does a lot more than that it like tries to take a whole entire, like github, workflows and and present them in an intuitive way um and in a way that, like we hope, reduces context, switching um you don't have to like switch from your code to your browser. um As often if you're using gh is the hope um and don't know just like to provide an experience. That is just feels comfortable for people that like to be in the terminal and are already there most of their day.

B

So what is uh I guess, what's the difference between this and the uh the regular git cli.

A

So it's they're they're, pretty different. um uh You know get like we, we intentionally don't try to replace git ever so we call git for you uh to do things. You know like getting commit logs, uh pushing branches stuff like that. It's like we call git, but we don't ever try to replace a git command so like gh is, is kind of it's. It's like a. I don't want to use the word successor because we're not trying to replace this other project, but there's an existing project called hub.

A

That is an open source project very pretty similar to gh, and it's the same person is kind of behind both uh my co-worker mieslav um has been in charge of hub now works on gh um and what he kind of learned over there is like hub, really tries to replace git and, like you know, let you call hub instead of get and then it'll add a bunch of github stuff to to get, and he just he found that to be really difficult to maintain and so, like you know, gh is just github and git is just get.

A

uh Sometimes we might call it to get, but we're never gonna replace git you're, always still gonna call git to do low-level things like stage files commit files, create branches stuff like that.

B

Okay, cool yeah, so that is that and um I'm a big fan of the the cli too well it gets. It gives a lot of like context um for just operating with with the github itself like github.com.

B

uh I also use hub back in the day so being able to create repos from the command line without doing this sort of dance of going to the ui, creating the url or the repo, and then I guess pushing that branch up into there like there's always that awkwardness of trying to teach people, github or yeah just teach github and teach them what a repo is open, a repo and then there's nothing there, and then they have to go and go to this magical place, which is the terminal.

B

So consistency being consistent on how you can approach teaching. It is helpful. um Speaking of consistency, it looks like the lag is improved. I think the bit rate might have been the fix, um so everybody yeah go ahead.

A

Oh, I might be quiet also I can. uh I can yell if that's helpful. Oh.

B

I can actually bump you up your volumes here as well, uh which is not a problem, um and I can lower myself down yeah.

A

B

Feedback live feedback. This is how open source works uh like what you see, I'm actually doing the mixing I'm doing the streaming, and uh this is all bootstrap for us. So happy everybody's stuck around and giving us a hawaii feedback as well, uh but speaking of live feedback. uh I wouldn't actually talk about the project itself, so this is you're. More than welcome to uh gh garden is fun. Actually, I'm not sure about that command. What is.

A

It's uh I moved it to gh repo garden. um It's also. I I want to give the caviar it's it's an easter egg that I added uh to gh. um It's it's broken in 1.0 for like a lot of repositories, yeah if it's fixed and trunk so it'll be out in the next release. But uh it's if you run it it'll.

A

Take your repository and drop you into kind of like a a roguelike uh environment where you you, the repository is rendered as a big garden, uh and so all the commits or flowers and there's just a couple of cute details and uh yeah. I did it. We have hack days on our team and I I wanted to like explore being like in a repo like like what, if the repository was a space and like what would that space look like and so yeah. That was my little attempt at that and uh yeah.

A

If you run it against the repo with enough commits, should work.

B

I am for some reason my terminal was dying on me, so I had to open up a new one, but I think I have one that I can test out.

B

uh I'm just curious because I've not seen that, but also I haven't been watching the uh the commits, like a hawk at all so gh, repo garden yeah.

A

We'll see if it crashes.

B

I also have not updated.

A

B

As well, uh updated.

A

Oh, if you're not at 1.0, it might not be in there, then! Oh, no, oh.

B

I'm definitely a 1.0 okay.

A

You're in there, uh so oh man, so this is a fun bug, um so I'm using uh rgb, color and yeah if, for some reason, whatever I'm doing, this might have been fixed, but those letters aren't supposed to be blinking, um it's something to do with mac. I I develop on linux like exclusively so like I had this kind of stuff. I have to do like some low-level uh escape code stuff and that's not always super consistent and then yeah something about when I switched to using the rgb um escape codes.

A

It leads to this blinking. I don't know what the hell I did on the mac because it doesn't fit on linux. So it's.

B

A lot prettier.

A

On linux, I I I I think, but if you can walk around with wads, um this should be able to yeah. Oh.

B

A

There are watts okay, yeah.

B

A

So you can wander around and then you know it tells you what you're looking at so every flower.

B

A

Every flower is a commit, and so it tells you who made it and then so. The color is supposed to be a derivation out of the hash.

B

Nice, this is my favorite committer.

A

B

A

It needs it needs the box flag. Like you added for credits.

B

Yeah, I mean everybody, I would say the last month is nothing but dependable, because I've shipped zero features to my project um yeah. So it's all depend about who's contributed, but that's pretty cool, I'm actually going to play with it, and I can get a linux environment not now. But I'll do that later to see what the uh what the author had in mind and envisioned yeah.

A

I have a mac somewhere in my house. I can try to fix it. Hey there's some one of the terminologies. I think it looks fine and not much or something. Maybe I'm just uh dreaming but um yeah. I know yeah. So that's I I'm. You know. I've got two little hidden commands like that in gh, I'm hoping to add plenty more.

B

Cool yeah well I'll. I honestly I need to actually just watch this repo because I don't mind getting the uh notifications for this, since I am now a committer on it, um but I just want to talk about the sort of the approach to the project too, as well like folks, can look up all the commands and check out the documentation and how to use it. uh But I want to understand the approach um so one. uh Why go? Why was that?

B

The choice when, like there are a lot of other tools, you can use to create clies, uh and actually, let's just start with that, like what was the decision behind uh choosing go in cobra.

A

Yeah, so I mean so I mentioned hub and when we started this team on day one, it wasn't like. Oh we're just going to make something new like we really like. Are we going to just maintain hope? Are we going to maybe change hope drastically? Are we going to make something new? We didn't really know, and we talked about it a lot uh so when we when we did decide. Finally, for a bunch of reasons, uh let's, let's just make something.

B

A

um You know mieslav had pointed out like well hub, had been in ruby for a long time that led to some performance and packaging problems, a community member just offered a full rewrite and go and misal just took it and was like pretty happy with the result, and so he had that positive experience.

A

I was really interested from mainly from a packaging standpoint like I I just I. We wanted this tool to be available to people in as many places as possible and to just be able to do cross-compilation and release binaries, and then we really wanted that that nice experience and I have been using enough. um There's a bunch of nice go commands like uh like micro as a cool, little editor, yeah um and some other stuff, and I love again like when you're talking about a programming language.

A

It feels weird to talk about how great it is to release, but but I really feel that like compiling and shipping go is a breeze, it's so nice, uh it's so much easier than compiling c, plus plus, and it's so much easier than packaging and shipping, ruby or python. So that was like a really big sell um and then performance like we're. Trying to you know, tell people hey. You should use this all day, like you're a programmer you're going to be using this tool a lot.

A

If you're going to use it, we don't want it to be slow. So we set a pretty um a pretty high bar for ourselves in terms of what what is you know how fast it should go. I I think some of the commands we could actually even go faster, we're trying to we're fighting mostly network latency but uh yeah. So that was another huge reason to go to go with go.

B

Nice yeah and, like the when you say, you're fighting network latency. Maybe I have a nice network outside of streaming and getting buffering, but uh like just I've done, I've used the gh for cloning, forked repos and just getting the context of the repo to my command line really quickly. uh It seemed like very fast like faster than actual get cloning, um so I've been oppressed so far.

A

We're just calling good clown under the hood yeah.

B

A

No magic there.

B

Okay, maybe there's no magic.

A

Yeah, I think I think conceptually it feels faster, because you just get the type gh reboot clone yeah.

B

You don't have to grab the url.

A

You know food yeah so like it always feels faster, but um but yeah it's um yeah, some some of the stuff around like uh pull request listing, um commit log polling that can be a little bit slow just from networking stuff, sometimes but yeah. It's not so bad.

B

Yeah and like the the one thing that I even noticed too as well because like um I, I think I joked on stream. I'm sure if I record, if it was on the recording, but um I've always learned go, I joke that. I wouldn't go once a year, um because I don't really have like an actual product project that I'm working on or like something I do at work. um So even doing my commit, which I think, oh you know I did assignee.

B

I wanted to find mike my pr uh because I actually did a pr a couple weeks ago, um uh assignee b, dougie, okay, let's delete this, uh but what I was getting at is like understanding how to actually run the build locally is something I always have to look up with like uh with like javascript projects uh and node, because there are very different ways to approach that problem, um and it's just like not consistent as far as when it goes to javascript projects but like with go with the binaries built directly into the the I guess is it?

B

Is it built in the standard library I believe so um it was a breeze actually run to see. My changes working like immediately once I did. I wrote the code, um which was nice, go with go.

A

Yeah, I'm a big fan of that also um yeah and, like you know, we can talk like the language itself, there's a bunch of stuff. I like about the actual language but yeah. I'm super relieved. I think these days it's it's like kind of a no-brainer that you want. You want to think holistically about the whole practice of programming and like a programmer's task, isn't just programming like you have to have development environments and releasing and like yeah.

B

A

I I appreciate that, um and it's it's you know I I would say it's really worked out for us. um Yeah I've been been happy with the development for gh for sure.

B

I had one question and I want to jump into the contributing md and talk about that a little quick. uh But my first question is: why is the contributing the not in the root and it's under the dot github folder? Is there a special reason for that.

A

uh I have no idea so somebody.

B

Put it there yeah, I think.

A

uh Somebody at github that um is involved with uh open source. You know making sure that we do things correctly. That's, I think, that's where they put it. So I I think this appears magically somewhere in the github ui, but I I'm not actually sure.

B

Yeah, it's supposed to show up here on the right, which I think if I am correct, it's not there anymore.

A

It might be in the in the insights, there's a really cool uh feature uh that I, like the community yeah, the community insights, page yeah, it's really cool there. It is yeah, so this just tells you um yeah it'll link it there. So I think that we put it in the github to uh make it show up here.

B

Okay, yeah because I know uh like even my projects I put in the root and when I went to contribute to this project I was like. Oh, they don't have a contributing md and then I found it by searching, uh which is people don't know you can hit t uh and on the root of the project and search uh which I've shown that before a couple times, uh you all need a pull request. Template you'd be 100.

A

Complete we have them. I don't know why we're getting a a yellow on that yeah they're in there. If you look in.

B

Oh there, it is uh maybe it's just it's the structure, uh maybe uh because you have you have it's uh in a folder anyway, you could talk to github about that uh anyway, I was just. I was just curious because I know I noticed actually all github open source projects do it in the dot github uh and you're the first project. I've actually talked about on stream uh about this. So I figured I'd ask that question um but yeah. This is the contributing md, and this is like so I had.

B

I I've been using the cli uh on stream. uh I I actually stream uh here on bw if you want to actually check that out, but I do some open source contributions uh because I use uh gh. I want to actually make a contribution on stream and I think uh uh cohost you were there. I think for this contribution. You were egging me on, um but yeah it was like first time did a go contribution to a public project that was like of this size.

B

I know it's still kind of beginning, uh but I found a lot of context that was actually super helpful and going back to the build, um like even understanding how to run the the build command over then run and see my changes right away again. This is something I've done in javascript projects which it's usually like a make file um that that you do to build with, but this is actually built directly within the language which was pretty.

A

Cool you can use the make file too here, um but.

B

A

It's I appreciate that we listed it out just because, like if you're on windows, um yeah.

B

A

Probably not going to have make so yeah. We want to make sure it's it's clear how to build if you're in an environment without make.

B

Yeah, I understand like the challenges of building a project that needs to run in the command line for multiple environments, so you have linux the different flavors of linux, mac and windows. I just recently paired program with someone on windows yesterday and I was not very helpful at all and.

A

B

A

Oh just yeah, I've been um like, I said. I work in linux, but I I I recently got a surface book uh laptop because I I wanted something that I could draw on and, like you know, play some light games on uh and so now so I've actually been experimenting with having windows 10 be like my laptop. So I work on a desktop just about all day and then go to the couch on that.

A

So I use wsl, so I'm still technically using linux, but I've been trying to do more like tasks and just like the default windows experience and like it's very different, it's been like a big learning curve for me and eye opening like I think we could do a much better job in gh of like supporting that environment. So if you're watching and you've been using our tool in windows, uh I I apologize for any rendering errors. We are aware of them uh and I'm trying to learn more. So I can fix that.

B

Yeah and what's the I guess, what's the process for folks who want to leverage the tool and provide feedback like how are you sort of taking feedback for from the millions of users yeah well,.

A

So um the I think we mentioned, like I think in the health docs or somewhere like you, can just you can open an issue with with the tool I mean. If your issue isn't it's broken, uh you can use it to open an issue with a feedback label and just kind of give us general feedback uh or open a bug, but otherwise it's going you're just going to.com and opening an issue there, but we do everything through issues so yeah.

B

A

Talked we've discussed like, should we have like a discussions thing or I don't know we haven't, we haven't moved beyond issues yet uh but yeah, but as part of the 1.0 release, we added the feedback um tag and there's a feedback template, so you can do issue create from the command line, just select feedback and then it's just kind of a general.

A

You know tell us what you think kind of thing.

B

Oh so you're just saying: can I just do gh issue create.

A

Yeah just do that and then you should get the feedback as an option. uh Well, you're, not you're in yeah yeah.

B

A

Capital r, cli cli well, that might be a bug, actually I'm not sure if we pull the templates uh for non-vocal repositories. So if you don't.

B

Feel like checked.

A

Out we can see.

B

Yeah, so this is this: these are my templates here, uh so I think.

A

B

It's actually inferring that I want to do the issue on my template.

A

um Yeah, you could do a dash capital, r and then clf cli, but I I'm not sure. If it'll pick up our templates.

B

Yeah this one's a simple title, so I'd have to be in the cli repo, which I think in most cases people aren't don't have the cli repo local um but interesting. If um folks want to provide that feedback, um it might.

A

Be until we talk about it yeah now I know we should fix that.

B

Yeah- and this is uh this- is why we do these streams as well, so I actually have been ignoring chat for a bit but uh yeah um for the the stream that I did when I contributed to this project. It was the stream where I called you dutch uh coast, he's actually belgian, so my my apologies, a big, very big difference and um yeah. It sounds like people are just sort of shouting out their features that they, like um with the with the cli, which is nice nice, to see yeah.

B

So as far as the operation of the project, so you mentioned, um support is actually going through the proper github support channels. So, if you are having issues with like windows and such you should definitely go there.

A

uh You can go there, that's you know we have. um We have an official github support person um that will kind of come to us with any issues that come in through official github support, um but for you know, for the most part, an issue is okay, like we've been doing support through issues um like usage support, in addition to like bug, support.

B

Excellent sorry, I'm just uh going to my uh twitch hearts in there for people saying the stream lag is gone, so it seemed like the low latency turning that off and then also lowering the bit rate was what did it, which is ironic, because I've definitely lowered the bit rate in the past but um yeah. It defaults at some high bit rate um anyway, um yeah.

B

So talking more about the cli process and the project itself um sort of how do you, I guess you just launched 1.0, so I'm not sure I'm sure not sure how much engagement you've had um as far as feedback and interactions with the community. Are you getting any outside contributors that are consistent and sort of have any ability to sort of shepherd that.

A

um We've had really awesome outside contributors um and uh yeah I mean definitely uh deutsche t has done contributed a lot in the lead up to 1.0 um avaliable's merchant is uh cool, dude has been been helping out a lot um and it's been active in like issues and pr's just kind of answering questions and stuff, which I know I really appreciate. um Yeah, there's a few a few other folks that have been helping out. I think in a contention with this project that has has always been around and it's definitely still around with 1.0.

A

Like you know, this is this is like it is a corporate project. You know like we're, we're we're a team at a company we're paid. This is my full-time job and my my teammates full-time job to kind of design and guide this project. So we want it to be open source because you know we want uh people's suggestions and contributions and they've definitely like tweaked our flow a number of times, but we do have like you know. We make plans like we have. You know we have like a road map. We have.

A

We try to keep things designed and consistent and so there's some tension there, where, like a lot of the feature, requests that come in like if they don't really fit into that workflow uh somebody from the art fit or the roadmap brother, somebody from their core team, has to kind of come in and be like. Well, this is a great idea, but here's the direction that we were kind of going in and we'll have a conversation about.

A

Can we capture the spirit of what you want and like incorporate it into the roadmap that we're doing and that it's kind of hard to have this conversation without the core team? And so I don't like it's uh it's. It's can be kind of hard.

A

Sometimes I think, to incorporate like every future suggestion, uh but something that we want to start doing now is just publishing a roadmap like we would like to have a completely public like here's, what we're designing here's, what we're you know, hopeful here's, what we're hoping to get to um and have that be something that people can interact with and and understand.

A

What's coming, um and hopefully once that exists, it'll be a little bit easier for the community to kind of help each other, because right now I feel like a lot of things are just kind of stuck until one of us full-time people has can come into the issue and kind of facilitate the conversation yeah, um and you know the roadmap's not public yet because we're tired, we just did 1.0, and it was a lot of work yeah. So we're working on that like we don't have it yeah.

A

You know we're working on that right now um after I take some time off and we relax and do do bug fixes and stuff for a little while, but but yeah making it a lot easier for people to know what's coming and know how to like fit their ideas and their suggestion kind of into that overall plan is a big deal for us.

B

Yeah there uh question in the chat too as well, um can we leverage gh as a library or is it only a cli tool.

A

That's a really good question, um so right now it's just a tool. uh It would be not worth it to try to use it as a library. um You know what we have we haven't talked about making it both. um What we have talked about is extracting uh some of our api and authentication stuff and putting making those standalone libraries and so like.

A

We just don't- have the enough engineers to maintain like this as a library and as a tool, but we're hoping that we can take certain bits of it out, isolate those and make those libraries and then people can use that to build stuff.

B

A

Github uh so yeah like that's right now, our org on github is very empty, uh but we have a lot of plans for uh filling it with the stuff that we extract out of gh.

B

Yeah and I've I've seen people um go says. I only do good questions, people saying that's a great question. um I only I've seen some people actually um embed, like the the gh inside of like actions themselves to do some cool things. uh I've also saw pretty much out the gate when actions got shipped a couple years ago uh hub getting the same sort of treatment where there are like specific hub specific actions. um So like what are you? What's your thought around people actually injecting that in the github actions.

A

I think it's great um yeah, like you know something that you mentioned earlier about like it's great, to have this in the command line, because it's easier to like teach github, um yeah and.

A

Something that made me think of is you know.

A

Gh is simultaneously for people that are like learning the command line, learning git learning github, but it's also for people that are already super advanced and just want to script and get going so we try to you know, take all the things that gh uh is supposed to do and we try to expose it in two ways: uh we try to expose it in a sort of human-friendly like intuitive kind of interactive mode, but every one of those workflows you can script by just invoking the command a little bit differently so like we don't consider either of those use cases superior like we want them to be on equal footing.

A

So using ghn actions, I think, is awesome like we that's and that's one of our goals for us for ourselves internally, because, like we use hub in our actions, you know because for a while, you couldn't do uh release automation with ghsn now, but so we had a goal of like well. We want to make sure that we can use gh in all those same scenarios. um Yeah because like hub is very much hub.

A

Is a little bit more skewed towards like power users and automation and stuff like that, so we we want to make sure that we're we're not leaving those people behind if they want to switch and use gh.

B

Yeah and I one use case that I saw from one of my uh uh friends in open source, uh he was leveraging gh to auth um into a an environment, uh because the generic github token from actions uh is definitely very limited and I think a lot of people when they sort of really try to become a power user of actions. They find very quickly the limitation.

B

A

B

Case was like he just wanted to be able to have more access without doing the extra work of like provisioning, tokens and stuff like that, um which I think he ended up getting it um working without auth to be honest, but he leveraged uh gh to basically do some of the menial work that he does to manage his project, which was interesting to see yeah.

B

So as far as the um uh I want to go back to because everybody was like uh sort of like really riled up in the the conversation on managing open source at a corporate company uh and sort of like the direction of that too, because I think that's a that's a common thing that I'm seeing with a lot of projects, even projects we're having here uh where folks are um like open sourcing, a portion of their business. So, like I don't.

B

I don't like this term open core um but like when the core of your project itself is not um like github github's, not open source, um the actual github github, uh but a lot of pieces around github are open source.

B

So that kind of feels like what this is uh like that term, that I I avoid using again or even mentioning again um but like what that looks like for like the future of the the road map- and I know we sort of touched on this a bit for like things like rc's and like um actually contributing this ideas to the road map on the project.

B

Like do you think, there's going to be like a space where we have like a sort of like a github cli summit or meeting or contributor uh engagement activity in the future.

A

I mean that that's the dream right I mean um I would love for us to be going in that direction. I think um so you know one thing I'll talk about like like again: we haven't, we haven't written our map yet and yeah, um but one of the things that uh you can actually there's a pr.

A

It's a closed pr that you can look up um uh something that mislove worked on for one of our actors uh is is called extensions um and it's a like a pretty lightweight way to just write any program in any language and have it be uh it kind of injected as a gh command.

A

um So if you use it'll be an older one um there, it is the 1037 support for command extensions. Okay,.

B

A

Yeah, so this is a really cool system. um We shelved it for 1.0, just because we were adding support for aliases, which is like a much more lightweight version of this, but this is something that we've talked about coming back to um and this would allow any contributor to extend gh in like pretty complex ways and create kind of their own gh experiences, and this is kind of we've been talking about this as a as a path towards that.

A

Like greater community involvement, where people can um you know, they can basically propose pretty significant changes to gh and say, and here it is, and people can use it today and then we on core can say. Like that's awesome, do you want to get it into the main line or like yeah stuff like that? So that's that's one route, I think, um but you know in terms of like the overall uh overall structure of it like yeah, I mean we are like we're.

A

This, like open source edge on a very big graph of of you, know a lot of close sort of stuff, uh and you know there's some.

A

There is some contention there um and I think that my hope is that the work that we're doing uh around like command line user experience is something that is inspiring even beyond this tool and, like my hope, is that some of the stuff that we extract can be useful even outside of ph, and so um I do like I still think of gh- is like a very um gh itself feels like a pretty mostly traditional, open source project, just with the exception of the the kind of romantic core road map, um because there's no part of gh, that's off limits to suggestions, or um you know, future changes.

B

Yeah I mean I like this idea too, as well around the extensions and like whatever it looks like when it gets shipped or opens up as a part of the roadmap, because I uh integrations is something that it'd be nice to be able to say gas extends or extend uh like depend. The bot like, if you wanted to actually enable that and then get interactions with the ci. That's what one of the things I feel like that.

B

I think the mobile app is actually working on uh hopefully soon, uh but like I build a lot of actions so like I want to see my actions logs, uh but I also wanna. I wanna see the logs for things like my netlify deployments, um so like being able to have that sort of like closer interaction to some of the integrations. That happened. That, through through github, would be an interesting like uh direction.

A

Yeah, I mean right now, you can already do this with um with the aliases and like I've been I've, been writing a little suite of uh of commands using aliases to do open source uh triage, um and so I I use the api to ask things like um show me all the issues that either have no comments or no comments from like a staff member, so that I know like what haven't we acknowledged.

A

Yet, let's come in or show me everything that has the bug label, but not a priority label like one of the three priority labels, and so um I've been extending gh a lot with aliases and that's you know it's simultaneously like super useful, but also kind of limiting, because like using the graphql api and like a one-liner, it gets like it's like 300 characters.

A

Long and so I think, like extending gh, is fun and really useful and a great way to kind of contribute from outside, and I think the extensions will just make that even even better and even more more cool and fun.

B

Cool I was going to ask the question: um are you currently working on anything right now? Do you have like an open pr that you anything of interest that we that you might want to share.

A

I know I've actually barely programmed in like two weeks. I I mean it says: we've had so many issues.

B

A

In and we have a first responder rotation, so somebody it's each week, one of the engineers um and there's three of us now it was two for a while.

A

uh We just got a third engineer uh sam, if you see him around the repo he's very, very nice and so yeah, so one of us is on is on call basically, uh and so I I just happened to get this week, um and so I've been doing all issue triage, um just responding to people prioritizing things, helping people debug issues um and then also trying to clean up our issues. So I've been doing like these big audits of everything. That's open. Is this still valid?

A

You know just trying to prune the you know, all the stuff that we accumulated during the beta, so yeah I haven't done any coding and I feel I'm getting like, like you know, nervous like yes yesterday I I two days ago, I think I processed over 100 bugs in a few hours, and I kept starting to fix things like. I would rather be programming, I think, but yeah so not for me. I think there is uh there's some open stuff from myself that I know I need to review.

B

Okay, cool. Well, I mean honestly, I appreciate your response to answer because I think self-care, especially in the open source world, um is, should be more of a common thing uh being able to take vacation. There was actually a tweet um a couple weeks ago of a maintainer who wanted to be able to go on vacation, so he actually uh opened up an issue and then tweeted out and shared it with his community. Saying please don't open the issues during this week. um It ended up being not.

B

It ended up, not working, um but we just instituted a uh feature uh yesterday um in response to uh hacktoberfest directly, but um actually not we're actually working on this feature already, but anyway the it's be able to limit interactions. So you actually limit interactions to only maintainers.

B

So if you happen to want to go into a vacation mode, uh that's a pretty cool feature. So everybody who doesn't already like follow the github change log. um You can read more about that here, so like take it out of the context of hacktoberfest just generally as um being able to um uh limit those interactions. That's this is how you would do it so how I recommend that.

A

Yeah this feature is awesome. uh I was really excited to see it happen. um Yeah, you know like I put get out of my phone um and I could definitely feel myself uh responding to issues more and more when I was out of the house and at night and it just it creeped up on me. I don't know if it's like that for other people, but.

B

I didn't at any.

A

Point be like I'm gonna work extra, uh but it was just hard. You know, because I knew that the next day well, there's gonna be some more issues coming in, so you know the more issues I respond to now. Maybe I'll have more time for programming, and so it's eventually you burn out on that. So um you know I. I was really thankful for that. I'm about to take.

A

You know two weeks off of work, and um I I'm definitely going to be putting myself in that vacation mode uh for those two weeks um so yeah, I'm I'm really thrilled that that got gotten.

B

Nice yeah I'm just looking at some of the open pr's too, as well to be able to um yeah. It looks like there's some like ghe stuff, so some enterprise stuff to make that work. um Oh, I even think about using gist in the context of the cli as well.

A

Yeah, that was something um that we we wanted just support forever, but we just like couldn't justify the prioritization, and that was something that a community member just was like. I added a just command, uh and I was really thankful for that. So like this was during the beta we got just create, um was provided to us by a community member, and we kept talking again like this is awesome we want even more just, uh but we just didn't really have time.

B

But we managed.

A

To get done all of our all of our wants, like all of our big desires for 1.0- and I just I uh you know, I don't want to promote this. Behavior, don't do this, but I spent a weekend. I went to the bar, I just balmer peaked and I wrote it much more. Just so, there's some bugs with the gist commands.

A

I'm sorry, but you can now list them and you can edit them interactively from the command line and so yeah it's you can do um a bunch of things with just now the the we don't have. We don't have deletion, yet uh editing could be better um but yeah. You can do something just and I really like it. I um I know I mean you, you saw it um the other week, but we did an internal internal. I did an internal demo for this that I did all my all.

A

My slides were just uh gists that I was rendering with gh and use aliases to move between them and yeah. It's a lot of fun.

B

Yeah, that's awesome and there was a was a question. uh Someone came in about making val quality and valuable contributions, and I think the answer you just kind of mentioned it uh in passing and your last response, but I think using the cli is probably the best way to make a quality contribution um and I think using the things that you could.

B

We want to contribute to is much better than sort of blindly looking for bugs, um because you could actually you'll probably run into those bugs you'll see the issue there, and then you have a use case to then sort of test your way to actually make a contribution. So my recommendation is use the cli.

B

uh It sounds like just there's some opportunity there in the way, just work to leverage that maybe make a presentation using only just and see how that sort of works for you and if it doesn't work for you, uh come back with feedback uh with what how it sort of worked with you um yeah did you have anything to add to that nate.

A

I think that's a great suggestion um and I mean yeah like I I I use gh. I try to use it as much as possible all day and that's that's like we all do on this game. We all use it um and yeah. That's that's the best way to figure out where, like you could in using it, you could find some little paper cut, that's really easy to fix, but because you've been using it, you know it's gonna feel really good to have that merged and we love those kinds of contributions.

A

um But, alternatively, like uh I, we've been trying to get better using a health wanted label. um So one of my tasks for this week, I'm hoping to get to is just kind of we don't want any enhancement issue that doesn't either have a help, wanted label or a core label, so we're using core to signify. Like you know, we want to work on this internally because not like privately, but just like we have a lot of this like this is maybe involves a bunch of refactoring or involves a lot of design decisions.

A

We'd like to do it ourselves. So that's a core issue and then everything else should be a help on it issue, uh and you know a lot of the contributions that we get are like out of the blue prs for things that weren't labeled help wanted.

A

Maybe like had open questions about how it should work, and it's like we, it's really hard for us to accept that kind of work. You know like we we're not really ready for it.

A

um We weren't even really sure what direction network should go in so definitely like looking for that help wanted label is a really good first step and we're going to be helping out by marking way more stuff help on it to make that easier, um yeah and then, finally, just like checking to see if anybody else is working on it, because I you know, we've had a couple instances where you know contributors, two or three people all want to do the same thing and we've actually on the same day got in prs for the exact same.

B

A

Yeah and- and um I get like, I feel I I really feel bad whenever we have to close the pr like I.

B

A

Guilty like it hurts me inside uh and uh but yeah so just definitely to say, like I want to work on this uh and put a comment on it on the issue saying that, um and uh that way other community members can see that and and they might collaborate with you and that maybe that'll be fun, um but at the very least you won't be like stepping on each other's toes.

B

Yeah so I actually same reason: I've had some low like underhanded pitches. For my uh my contribution or my good first issues where I'll get the same thing, uh so I created this github action to take action, uh which is essentially um one of the limitations for assigning yourself to an issue is that you have to be in the org or you have to be an outside contributor.

B

So I created an action, so someone just writes the the word dot take um onto the issue and then that way, whoever comments first, like that's, who I expect to to sort of ship, the pr and, if you aren't, I politely ask you to like: please you know let the other person have the time to to fix it um because they did go in and say like.

B

I would like to fix this and, like majority that, where that happens, are my good first issues uh where people sort of like they, I don't know like the race error errors or whatever race conditions uh of everybody sort of jumping. On the same thing, that's kind of really easy to do that. I leave as like, I guess, at open source maintain and relieve the breadcrumb crumbs in our project like yeah.

B

This would be great to work on, uh but like I'm going to work on something that probably is going to be a core issue, as you mentioned, um and leave this open up for other people to work on which it sounds like going back to your example of like having the gist things work but like. I could see that not being a priority um just for the overall project, even for like future releases. um Yeah.

A

This is really cool yeah. I we have that the exact same problem, where, like I mean for I felt like such a jerk for a while. I was like um asking people to add me as a reviewer and everything and they're like we can't you can't add you can't, assign you can't add your viewer unless you're in the org and like yeah yeah. So that's that right now, it's just manual like I. I just try to check.

A

I go through all my notifications and if somebody says I want to take this, I manually assign them and so like. This is really cool, tooling,.

B

Yeah and it's it's, this amount of bash code um to make that work well, this is pretty much all the work like this could be the uh use the gh client if I wanted to, but this is something I I talked to a maintainer about like as as their issue they had um so I've had this this bash code sitting around for the longest time to make it work uh and it's the beauty of actions is actually to shove it into a uh at this point.

B

Now it's a well, I don't know how many people know about the composite runs um inside baseball. I'm gonna actually have a youtube video about this uh in the future, uh but you don't actually have to even do a docker container anymore. You can just shove the bash code into the action.yaml, similar to github script, um and I'm I'm speaking of it.

B

As everybody knows what I'm talking about all these terms, as if you follow me on the internet but um yeah bwo, search that on youtube, uh you'll you'll see the video and I'll explain that more in detail uh in the future, um but yeah we're starting.

A

B

I don't know anything about it. Yeah do you. I mean it's funny, because I talked to a lot of hovers uh at github and like there are a lot of blind spots like this like, if you just use it this way or use the github. This way uh you might not even use like you might not even be using actions to be quite honest like which is um pretty common internally because, like I don't know how much actually not a lot of actions on github github, um mainly just ci stuff, I.

A

Yeah I learned it for a gh uh and I've gotten pretty into it. I think it's, uh it is actually really useful. I I'm like um uh very I I don't like in a purely technological sense. I would describe myself as conservative uh in that, like new stuff is like.

A

Oh, I don't know, I have all the things that I know uh and I like those things and I I really like old ideas and and dusting them off and seeing if they're useful, like just in general, I just kind of intentionally don't look at new things, so yeah, even as a hubber like actions, I'm sure that somebody's excited about that I'm not going to pay attention uh and I didn't, and then you know, but because of gh, uh I needed to learn it for doing like release, automation, yeah and now I'm on board.

A

It's a good thing. uh You know I don't I don't reject new things. I just kind of put off learning them until I have to, uh and I don't I don't assume new things are good uh because they're usually not there's a lesson. I've learned in my career, uh you know. Usually somebody is lying to you so but action's not a lie. I think they're actually really awesome.

B

There was a lot of. There was definitely a lot of pain in actions up front. You know we had we changed the entire api and how it works uh between one point and 2.0. So a lot of people sort of got burnt out from that, um but I think the payoff of actually you know even waiting for actions to even like be developed and have like really cool hooks into your code base and stuff.

B

Like that, um it's wonderful and uh as you bring up the uh uh feeling, pain and the pain point, uh I actually wanted to show how I I mentioned this in the video I created. But the way I was able to run test uh for the cli was actually through code spaces, which I'm gonna have to use the.

A

B

Bar to get this, but um everybody don't pay attention to the the black bar at top um yeah, for whatever reason code spaces has to the way I have access to it. It has to have staff bar which I'm not.

B

I have to clear the cache all right, one sec, all right come on code spaces, I believe in you there we go yeah so the way I ended up running tests, because I had a, I actually had an older version of the cli or sort of go locally, uh and the cool thing about this is because I'm not really uh it sounds like the best ring is up again, but um I'm not a regular user of go.

B

So I had like a version that was like three versions old, um but I was able to just throw up a code space and then have that run, and then the tests were running. So I don't have to actually show this, but you all can watch the video um and speaking of which we're actually winding down anyway and since the buffering is like back up again, uh I want to thank you nate for chatting about the the cli, the the gh. uh Now everybody's got questions about the staff bar at this point.

B

I I I always am shy of showing that and make sure it's off, um but anyway you could ask me more questions and some dms I'll give you very much no answers, because I don't know much about it myself. I just know. I know that sometimes features can show up in the the way people write branches- and I don't want to.

B

I don't want to share future things, um but yeah nate. Where can people find you on the internet and um yeah we'll end with that?.

A

uh I'm I'm a reluctant user of twitter. I guess I don't use it very much, but I'm nate underscore smith there, because I made it back in 2007 before I switched to filming, and then I run a community on a linux server, that's called tilde.town, so it has.

A

I have a website there, that's kind of my my my home on the web, so uh tilda dot, town, slash, tilde character, uh velma bim and I don't know it's a bunch of writing and dreams, and rambling and stuff like that, uh but yeah those and then I'm on twitch. Also, I very intermittently stream uh I like to stream weird stuff. Sometimes I do programming. Sometimes I do noise music yeah, just whatever I feel like doing.

B

Excellent and uh everybody else can find me at doggio, follow the channel for updates and notifications, and uh we will have a future streams coming up. We'll have, um I think, in the future, we do have gatsby coming on to talk about their project and their documentation and how they're working on that, I think we'll have create react app, as well as another project coming up in a couple weeks and then um actually a lot of front-end projects. Actually.

B

um So, if you like javascript, uh definitely come by on open source fridays for every friday, either apac time or us time. So with that being said, uh see ya cool thanks. So much.