GitHub after Microsoft: How it has changed

Long a major hub of open source development, Get started with GitHub. • It adds tools to help understand how are project is operating, as well as GitHub Pages and a wiki for handling documentation.

There’s also been a rationalization of GitHub’s Enterprise product line. Enterprise Cloud used to be a hosted enterprise instance, while Enterprise Server gave businesses the option of self-hosting their own GitHub servers. Those two products have now been combined in a single product, with GitHub Connect linking on-premises and cloud repositories. This new approach simplifies building hybrid architectures, with one per-user-per-month license covering all your repositories.

Fixing GitHub: new tools and improvements

Perhaps the most important initiative under way is what GitHub is calling the new Pull Requests extension for Visual Studio Code, you can manage pull requests directly, targeting branches and sending code diffs, as well as comments. Once you’ve made the request, you can track it from inside Visual Studio Code, seeing which of your requests have been integrated into a branch and getting details of why a request may have been rejected.

GitHub has been releasing regular updates to its own tools too. They include two major updates to GitHub Desktop. The latest release, GitHub Desktop 1.6, makes it easier to get started, giving hints on what to do once you’ve finished setup. You’re given suggestions based on your current GitHub usage, with a list of current repositories and the option of cloning one on to your local PC,or creating a new repository from scratch. You also get the option of adding any local Git repositories to your GitHub account.

What GitHub’s future looks like

Friedman has three goals for GitHub:

• Ensuring GitHub is the best place to run productive communities and teams.
• Making GitHub accessible to more developers around the world.
• Improving its reliability, security, and performance.

Those are big ambitions, but the commitment seems to be real as evidenced by the rapid rollout of changes. By making lives easier for developers, Microsoft is going to make GitHub more attractive. That will let GitHub build on its community and gain the resulting network effects.

With major projects like LLVM migrating to GitHub, it looks like Microsoft’s stewardship of the service is gaining community acceptance. That’s important for GitHub, because it’s a service that’s as easy to migrate from as it is to migrate to. Friedman’s open source background helps here too, especially with the lessons he learned commercializing the Mono project at Xamarin.

Running a business that supports open source development needs a light touch and a sensitivity to the needs and requirements of modern application development. With Microsoft’s tenure at GitHub now three months old, there’s a definite sense of rejuvenation around the platform—and that’s a very good thing indeed.