The GitHub Blog: Watercooler

If you joined us for our third annual dodgeball tournament last Sunday, we thank you and your team, and we hope you had as much fun as we did. It was a great day, and we raised a lot of money for some awesome causes.

Heroku ultimately prevailed and took home their second OctoTrophy! We couldn't host the event without the participation of the community, and we’d like to thank all of the companies and organizations that came out and took some hits for charity: Heroku, Constant Contact, Twilio, Atlassian, New Relic, Pivotal Labs, Thumbtack, Perforce, HRK, Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, Go Daddy, Outcast Agency, and Airbnb.

And, if you haven’t gotten a chance yet, take a look at the 4 fantastic non-profits that we chose to support this year: Streetside Stories, Second Harvest, Year Up, and Family House.

Additionally, we owe a huge “thanks!” to the World Dodgeball Society, for serving as incredible referees and just generally being awesome; SportNGIN, whose easy-to-use bracketing system was the backbone of our scheduling and scoring method; Slider Shack, who supplied all-you-can-eat tater tots and mini-burgers to our hungry athletes; and Garden Creamery, who soothed their wounds and their pride with tasty cold treats.

We ran our very first game jam last year and had so much fun, we decided to throw another one!

The Challenge

You have the entire month of November to create a web-based game loosely based on the theme "change".

What do we mean by loosely based on "change"? We literally mean, loosely based. Some examples might be a FPS where you throw the loose change in your pockets at the enemy or perhaps a puzzle game where you have to change form to overcome obstacles.

Your game. Your rules. You can participate either as an individual or as a team. You're encouraged to use open source libraries, frameworks, graphics, and sounds in your game.

The Prizes

We're giving away shiny new iPad Airs (16GB models) to our 5 lucky winners. Runners-up will receive a $100 credit for the GitHub Shop, where they can grab some of our shirts, hoodies, stickers, and more!

All winners and runners-up will be showcased on our blog.

Judging

We have a handful of judges who are eager to play your games!

• Adam 'Atomic' Saltsman - Game maker and dad, creator of Canabalt and Flixel.
• Aleissia Laidacker - Team Lead AI at Ubisoft.
• David Czarnecki, Lead Engineer at Agora Games.
• Matt Hackett, Co-founder of Lost Decade Games.
• Kyros Starr, Gaymer and Tech Writer at GitHub.
• Lee Reilly, Gamer Dad and Software Developer at GitHub.
• Romana Ramzan, Denki's Player Champion, Global Game Jam Director.

The Rules

• To qualify for entry, you must fork the github/game-off-2013 repository to your individual or organization account. Not sure which account type would be best for you? Check out this handy help article, which explains the differences between the two types of accounts.
• All entries must be web-based, i.e. playable in a browser. HTML5, WebGL, Unity, Torque 3D, Node JS, and Flash are all possible - just be sure the source is made available on your fork.
• You must be over the age of 13.

Instructions

• If you don't already have a GitHub account, sign up for a personal account now - it's free!
• Fork the github/game-off-2013 repository to your individual account (or to a free organization account).
• Be sure to follow @github on Twitter for updates.
• Make sure your code is pushed to the master branch of your forked repository before Dec 1st!
• Make sure you have a README file that includes a brief description of your game, what open source projects (if any) you used, and a screenshot.
• Your repository should have a brief description and the playable URL entered into the fields shown below (this will make our judging process easier):

Comments / Questions / Help

• New to Git, GitHub, and/or version control? Check out our help documentation to get started!
• Questions about Git/GitHub? Please email support@github.com and be sure to include 'GitHub Game Off' in the subject.
• Questions specific to the GitHub Game Off? Please create an issue. This will be the official FAQ.
• The official Twitter hashtag is #ggo13.

Last year, 20 teams faced off on the dodgeball court, (in the name of charity, of course). It was a ton of fun, and we were able to raise over $62,000 to give to four amazing non-profits.

We hope you'll join us this year, for the 3rd annual GitHub Dodgeball Tournament!

We've brought back the folks from the World Dodgeball Society to help with the tournament. This year, we have room for 22 teams to compete in the tournament next month. All you need to compete is 10 to 15 of your strongest co-workers or friends, a donation of $3,000, and to register. Then join us Sunday, November 17th at the SoMa Recreation Center!

We will all be playing for four amazing local charities:

• Second Harvest Food Bank: mobilizes individuals, companies, and community partners to connect people to the nutritious food they need.
• Streetside Stories: cultivates young people's voices to develop literacy and arts skills, fosters educational equity, values diversity, and builds community.
• Family House: Provides housing and support for low-income families of children with cancer or life-threatening illnesses.
• Year Up: Inspiring students to pursue careers in science and technology.

The Facts:

• What: The Second Annual Octocat Dodgeball Invitational
• Where: SoMa Rec Center, 270 6th Street
• When: Sunday, November 17th from 1:00pm - 6:30pm
  • 1:00 to 1:30 - Sign in and warm up
  • 1:30 to 4:30 - Tournament play
  • 5:00 to 6:00 - Finals
  • 6:00 to 6:30 - Awards ceremony
  • 7:00pm - After-party, details coming soon

Register here: http://dodgeball.github.com/

GitHub believes in giving back to the community. We sponsor conferences, help run hackathons, host charity events, and now, we're trying something new. On October 8th, 2013, in conjunction with our new GitHub for Good program, we will be holding our first-ever blood drive!

Join us in giving the gift of blood at a mobile collection unit coming to SOMA. In addition to knowing that you've made a huge difference in someone's life, as a thank you we will be offering tours of our cool new digs as you sip on your recovery glass of OJ. We'll also have a few other surprise goodies for all successful donors. You can sign up here using sponsor code GITHUB to find our specific event. The facts:

When: Tuesday, Oct 8th 11:00a to 5:00p
Where: GitHub HQ

Please note: You must sign up in advance to participate!

A few reasons to give blood:

• Every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood.
• More than 44,000 blood donations are needed every day.
• A total of 30 million blood components are transfused each year in the U.S. (2006).
• The average red blood cell transfusion is approximately 3 pints.
• The blood type most often requested by hospitals is Type O.
• The blood used in an emergency is already on the shelves before the event occurs.
• More than 1 million new people are diagnosed with cancer each year. Many of them will need blood, sometimes daily, during their chemotherapy treatment.

We hope you’ll join us in supporting the American Red Cross and those in need of blood.

We're now five installments into our talk series Passion Projects, which we created to help surface and celebrate the work of incredible women in our industry. Each of our speakers has a unique story to tell and they're all stories we think are worth sharing with you, our community.

Recently we sat down with past speaker Rachel Myers to talk a little more about Railsbridge and the path that led her to become a developer.

Jessica Hische joined us in July for the fifth installment of our talk series, Passion Projects. Jessica dazzled us with her talk about procrastiworking. Check out the full video of her talk and our panel discussion below.

Photos from the event

Thank you to everyone who came out for Jessica's talk and made it an incredible night.

Today we're excited to share a new episode of OctoTales - our video series about incredible companies using GitHub to work better together. This episode features Balanced.

Since 2011, Balanced has been using GitHub to build a better payment system for marketplaces. By having public discussions with their customers, getting feedback on product design, APIs and features, they stay focused on making something people want.

If you would like to be a part of the OctoTales series, tell us your story at tales@github.com

About a year and a half ago we announced Improved Subversion Client Support - an improvement to the original service that provided better write access, partial checkouts, and access to branches and tags using the Subversion trunk/branches/tags convention.

Now, it's time to shut down the old SVN support.

The old service is currently running on svn.github.com, and will be turned off on July 31. If you have any SVN checkouts of GitHub repositories from svn.github.com, you should recreate them using the new github.com URL. Since svn.github.com only checked out the default (usually 'master') branch, you should change checkouts that use URLs like this:

https://svn.github.com/user/project.git/

To this:

https://github.com/user/project/trunk/

In April we announced the second annual GitHub data challenge. Since last year, GitHub's public timeline data on Google BigQuery has grown by over 80 million events, including 3.8 million new repositories, 38 million pushes, and 8 million comments on issues, pull requests, and commits.

After receiving some amazing entries in the previous challenge, we were excited to see what people would discover with another year of data. The results blew us away: we saw many more entrants and novel applications of our data. GitHubbers ranked their favorite entries, and after tallying the votes, we're happy to announce the top 3 entries for the 2013 GitHub data challenge.

First Place

The Open Source Report Card, by Dan Foreman-Mackey, analyzes a GitHub user's contributions to produce a "report card" with statistics and automatically generated prose.

Second Place

How often do people use tabs over spaces in Java? How many commits have lines wrapped to 80 characters? Popular Convention by Outsider uses GitHub data to analyze conventions in selected programming languages.

Third Place

David Fischer's visualization of open source contributions by location shows the geographic distribution of contributors behind the 200 most active GitHub repositories.

Thanks

Congratulations to the winning entries, and huge thanks to everyone who submitted an entry! Our top 3 winners will receive gift certificates to the GitHub Shop for $200, $100, and $50, respectively.

We can't wait to see what the next data challenge will bring!

Millions of people around the world use GitHub every day to build software together, but the GitHub Way™ isn't limited to code.

We are humbled to see that the White House drafted and released the official Open Data Policy of the United States on GitHub! The Presidential Memorandum calls for the creation of the aptly named Project Open Data, with the goal of making government data "available, discoverable, and usable – in a word, open".

Today's news marks the first time a government entity has published law as a living, collaborative document. We're excited to see how the Open Data Policy evolves with the input of the community, and we hope this is just the first of many.

By choosing GitHub Pages, government employees as well as citizens are empowered to continuously propose and discuss potential improvements, creating a living policy document to "unlock the potential of government data".

Civic hackers and public servants at all levels are using GitHub to collaborate on everything from information about elected officials to the location of the nearest bike rack. While adding a to a pull request isn't going to replace ballots at your local polling place any time soon, one thing's for sure: the revolution is only just beginning.

At GitHub, we're big fans of traditional computer science education, and we're also happy to see some alternative models emerging for training new programmers. There are the Massively Open Online Courses from traditional institutions, online content from organizations like Udemy and CodeSchool, in-person experiences like Girl Develop It, and full-time intensive programs like Dev Bootcamp and the Flatiron School.

In this vein, I recently had the pleasure of teaching a short class at gSchool near Downtown Denver. gSchool is a non-traditional web development training program that takes passionate, motivated people and promises to make them into programmers after six months and 60 hours per week of focused education. Classes are taught by professional web developers who focus on building real things using technologies and practices in actual use by real employers. Their go-to tech stack looks pretty familiar: Ruby, Rails, various JavaScript frameworks, platform-as-a-service cloud deployments, and of course GitHub. They hack relentlessly. They write tests. They are coding before 9am every day.

For a GitHubber, this is kind of an exciting place to hang out.

gSchool's Lead Instructor, Jeff Casimir, invited me to drive down to their facility and give a few hours of advanced Git instruction. This group of students was already several weeks into their program, so naturally they knew Git basics before I got there. I spent the morning teaching them some Git internals, clarifying how rebase works, sharing helpful tips and tricks, and generally answering whatever questions they had. This was a room full of a few dozen hungry students who were going to learn what they needed to know no matter what I did—and I don't mind saying what a rewarding environment that is for a professional teacher to engage.

One of the students, John Maddux, blogged about the class. He had fun with the lesson, but more importantly, he learned precisely the Git internals I had hoped he would learn. This is music to a teacher's ears.

Computer science education seems to be in an important transition, as the industry searches for more optimal solutions to the problem of training new programmers. Will the future remain dominated by the traditional CS degrees of the past? Will four-year institutions be replaced with programs like gSchool and its many alternatives? Will Massively Open Online Courses overtake all the rest? For now we can only watch and see, but we're delighted to be involved even in a small way, and look forward to more collaboration with others in this exciting space.

If you're interested in Git and GitHub training for your team, check out what we have to offer or email Jessica to talk about getting us onsite.

Five years ago today, @defunkt, @pjhyett, and I gathered in our online chat room and prepared to push a commit to GitHub that would finally mark the public launch of our little Git-hosting service. During the private beta we had signed up 6,000 users and helped them share 2,500 repositories.

Now, five years later, I'm incredibly proud to be part of a company with 158 team members dedicated to helping our 3.5 million users collaborate across 6 million repositories. It’s been a wild ride and I couldn’t be happier with the amazing community of people who use and love GitHub every day.

Thank you all for helping us to build better software, together. Here's to another five years!

There are millions of projects on GitHub. Every day, people from around the world are working to make these projects better. Opening issues, pushing code, submitting Pull Requests, discussing project details — GitHub activity is a papertrail of progress. Have you ever wondered what all that data looks like? There are millions of stories to tell; you just have to look.

Last year we held our first data challenge. We saw incredible visualizations, interesting timelines and compelling analysis.

What stories will be told this year? It's up to you!

To Enter

Send a link to a GitHub repository or gist with your graph(s) along with a description to data@github.com before midnight, May 8th, 2013 PST.

Data access

The GitHub public timeline is a featured public dataset available on Google BigQuery. The "timeline" table has over a year's worth of public activity and is approaching 100M rows. You can find even more data available in JSON format on The GitHub Archive project.

You are free to use any tools you like. If you choose to use BigQuery, running queries against the GitHub dataset is free for the first 100GB of query processing. Pricing information for additional query processing is available here. After signing up for BigQuery, add the project name "githubarchive".

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Prizes

GitHub staff will be voting on our favorite visualizations and there will be prizes for the top three spots:

• 1st Prize: $200 to the GitHub Shop
• 2nd Prize: $100 to the GitHub Shop
• 3rd Prize: $50 to the GitHub Shop

We will also feature the three winning entries on the GitHub blog. Winners will be announced the week of May 20th.

Analyzing Millions of GitHub Commits

Last year Ilya Grigorik and I spoke at the Strata conference, showcasing some of the interesting analysis and visualizations from the data challenge including which programming language results in most frustration (VimL), amusement (Ruby) and surprise (Perl).

Celebrating a big feature release with a distributed team can be difficult awesome.

We typically deploy dozens of times per day and ship new features regularly. We celebrate shipping several different ways, but for really big features we toast!

How to celebrate a big feature with GitHub

When we ship a really big feature someone will kick off the celebration by creating a new issue in a special celebratory repository.

Everyone joins in by taking a photo of themselves with a beverage in hand, from a Worlds Best Dad coffee mug to a large bottle of Club Mate.

We add our photo to the issue by dragging it into the comment field.

The issue usually takes a day or so to make the rounds, since we have GitHubbers spread out all around the world. Once everyone has sent in their toast, we run a simple script that generates an animated gif to mark the occasion.

Here's to more s, cheers!

For several months now, the jQuery team has been fulfilling one of their major goals to open-source all of the content and design of all jQuery web sites on GitHub. jQuery Plugins are now managed through GitHub as well, making the process of finding and releasing plugins as easy as ever.

We caught up with several members of the jQuery team in San Francisco to hear more about how they use GitHub.

If you would like to be considered for an OctoTales interview, tell us a story at tales@github.com