GitHub The Download, 24 Feb 2023

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From YouTube: The Download: Learning to Code with Codespaces, MINIX from Scratch, Doom on a LEGO and more!

Description

Presented by @ChristinaWarren

On this episode of The Download, Christina is braving the cold in Seattle while checking out the latest developer news and open source projects.

Stories discussed:

0:00 Intro
0:55 Beginner's Guide to GitHub Codespaces https://github.blog/2023-02-22-a-beginners-guide-to-learning-to-code-with-github-codespaces/
1:54 Update on the Future Stability of Source Code Archives and Hashes https://github.blog/2023-02-21-update-on-the-future-stability-of-source-code-archives-and-hashes/
2:45 What is ChatGPT Doing...and Why Does it Work? https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/
3:48 MINIX From Scratch https://github.com/o-oconnell/minixfromscratch
5:18 *Project Spotlight*: NoteSH https://github.com/Cvaniak/NoteSH which uses the fantastic Textual https://github.com/Textualize/textual
6:05 *Christina's Pick of the Week*: Doom on a LEGO brick from James Brown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o76U0JPrMFk article discussing how it works https://www.hackster.io/news/james-brown-s-tiny-lego-brick-computer-is-now-truly-self-contained-with-a-playable-doom-port-b015077f8337

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About GitHub
It’s where over 100 million developers create, share, and ship the best code possible. It’s a place for anyone, from anywhere, to build anything—it’s where the world builds software. https://github.com

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Learning to code with GitHub code spaces, just what is chat GPT doing anyway, some great open source projects and a pick of the week. That proves that you can play Doom on anything all that and more on this episode of the download.

A

Back to another episode of the download I'm, your host Christina Warren senior developer Advocate at GitHub, and this is the show where we cover the latest developer news and open source Projects, please like And subscribe, and so my short this week is from GitHub, but so is my beanie and I'm wearing a beanie because it's like 30 degrees, Fahrenheit in Seattle, that's like negative 1 degrees in celsius, so yeah it's cold, hence the hat. But you know what isn't cold all the cool news that we've got to talk about that was terrible. Okay.

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First up, let's talk about a fantastic blog post from my girl, Roselle Scarlett titled, a beginner's guide to learning to code with GitHub code spaces. Now this blog post is fantastic. Roselle goes into tons of detail about how you can use GitHub code spaces in your journey to learning to code and GitHub code spaces if you're not familiar, are a way to have a fully configured development environment in the cloud that you can access from a web browser or inside your favorite IDE, and it's a great way to take on a really big project.

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We even use it internally when we're building GitHub, but it's also fantastic for beginners, because you can use a code space to get started with a tutorial without having to worry about how to configure your machine or even if your machine is powerful enough to run the tutorial and you can even use code spaces on an iPad or a Chromebook. So it's really really great for beginners of all Stripes Results post is fantastic.

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I've got a link to it in the show notes, and the description down below next up I also wanted to call attention to another blog post that our team posted about an incident that happened on January 30th, so on January 30th GitHub deployed a change that slightly altered the compression settings on source code downloads.

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However, this change has some unforeseen consequences for a number of communities and after they let us know we rolled the change back well in his blog post. Matt Cooper does a really great job with a postmortem explaining what happened and what measures we'll be taking in the future to prevent further surprises, because we don't want people to be surprised and how future changes will be handled.

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My thanks to Matt for the blog post and to the whole team who was able to roll back that change as well as my thanks to our users, who were impacted by that change for their patients. We really do appreciate it. Links are in the show notes and the description down below. Moving on to some AI news, we've been talking a lot about AI on this show lately, and uh most of our Focus has been on large language models like gpt3, which is what is used in things like chat, GPT and GitHub copilot.

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But how does all of this stuff actually work? Well, famed computer scientists and researcher Stephen Wolfram wrote a blog post, although I'm going to be honest, calling out a blog post is doing it a bit of a disservice.

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It's 20 000 words and it's more like a small book, but it's called what is chat GPT doing, and why does it work I read this last week and then I read it again earlier this week and to me this is one of the best explanations of how these large language models work as anything that I've read or watched and as I said, this is a long read, but most of it is really approachable, even for beginners and I think that this is a really great way of getting a better understanding of why these models work.

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The way that they do really really impressive stuff, although I would expect no less from Mr Wolfram and I've got it linked down below. Speaking of learning from the best I saw, this GitHub repost shared all over my feeds this week and I just kind of wanted to add my own plus one to it as well. All right so do you know your open source history?

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If you do, you might know that Linux, the operating system and kernel was greatly influenced by a project called Minix or mini Unix, and that was designed to teach students how to build operating systems and how they work, and one of those students was a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds and he built his own system called Linux and well.

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History was made books that reference Minix are still being used, but as the author of this repo that I've got linked, found getting Minix 3 to actually build and compile is kind of complicated, and thus we have a new repo called Minix from scratch, and it's from student oyson O'connell who has outlined how to compile that code. That's referenced in the book, operating systems, design and implementation volume 3E, and he notes this in the readme.

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It was to get a reasonable development setup to make it possible for newbies like myself, to learn from the book, and this is an attempt to fix that and make it easy to browse edit recompile and execute the code. Fantastic work, oy sen, also I'm. Very sorry. If I'm, if I'm mispronouncing, your name I did my best, there are lots of reasons. It makes sense to study something like Minix rather than jumping straight into Linux, especially for beginners I love that this repo is here to help more people learn great work.

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I've got a link to the repo in the show, notes and the description, some great work, and now it's time for our GitHub project Spotlight, where I highlight a project from the community that I've run across, and this one is called note sh and it's a fully functional, Sticky Notes, app that you can run in your terminal and it's from GitHub user cvaniac and it was built using textual, which is a Tui library that we've talked about before, and the idea is that you can have a functional, Sticky, Notes app that works with them key bindings in your terminal that you can easily access at any time.

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It's pretty neat I'm, really really impressed with the functionality of the app and it's a really great example, I think of the source of stuff that you can do with textual. So great work. I've got a link to the project and the repo in the show, notes and the description down below really really fun, and now it's time for my pick of the week, all right, so one of the longest standing memes on the Internet is that Doom will run on anything. But can it play?

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Doom is not so much a question anymore as a dare still I. Don't think that I ever expected to see Doom running on a Lego brick. Yet that's exactly what maker and Graphics engineer at what a workshop James Brown has been able to do so. For the last few months, Brown has been documenting his process process on YouTube of getting programmable. Oled displays running on plastic, Lego bricks, and now he's managed to do it wirelessly and using an accelerometer for tilt control, meaning that he can even control the game too.

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So he's basically hidden a controller inside these bricks that he can then move around and run Dumont on a Lego brick. It's incredible. You've got to check out James's work, I've got it linked down below. This is beyond cool. It's just my mind is blown. What's the next thing that you would like to see someone put doom on, let me know in the comments down below and let me know your thoughts on any of our other stories. Well, that's going to do it for me.

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If you liked this episode, please give us a like on YouTube. It really helps us out and subscribe to the GitHub YouTube channel for all your nerd needs see you next time.