Earlier this week, GitHub hosted their annual GitHub Satellite event. The GitHub Satellite 2020 event this year was completely virtual, and free for all to attend. At this years event, GitHub has made a number of announcements including many new features being added to the GitHub platform; as listed below.

Major Announcements

At the GitHub Satellite 2020 virtual event, they have made 4 new product announcements. These features will be helping teams and communities utilizing GitHub to better work together.

1) GitHub CodeSpaces

This brings the Visual Studio CodeSpaces web-based IDE to be used with GitHub. It will allow you to use a fully-featured, cloud-hosted dev environment (that spins up in seconds) directly within GitHub. This will help you to start contributing to a project immediately, from any machine, all without needing to install anything locally.

GitHub Satellite '20 Announcements: Discussions, CodeSpaces, securing code, and more! 1 — GitHub CodeSpaces – Source: GitHub

2) GitHub Discussions

GitHub Discussions provides a new way for software communities to collaborate, within GitHub, but outside the codebase. It’s a fact that software communities don’t just write code, they also brainstorm feature ideas, help new users get started, and collaborate in many other ways. Previously, GitHub only offered Issues and Pull Requests as a place to have these conversations. For these conversations GitHub is now adding GitHub Discussions.

GitHub Satellite '20 Announcements: Discussions, CodeSpaces, securing code, and more! 2 — GitHub Discussions – Source: GitHub

3) Code Scanning and Secret Scanning

Consuming and building software safely and keeping things secure from mistakes is an important part of collaborating on software. Last year, GitHub acquired Semmle, introduced code security in developer workflows on GitHub, made GitHub a CVE Numbering Authority, and launched their own GitHub Advanced Security offering. Now, GitHub is expanding this in two new ways:

Code scanning is now available as a GitHub-native experience
Code scanning is now available for private repositories

GitHub Satellite '20 Announcements: Discussions, CodeSpaces, securing code, and more! 3 — Code Scanning – Source: GitHub

4) GitHub Private Instances

More and more enterprises rely on GitHub communities to build and use software. GitHub wants every enterprise to be able to do this with confidence, regardless of how strict their own requirements for security and compliance are. For this reason, GitHub is planning to add GitHub Private Instances. This will offer a new, fully-managed option for enterprise customers that will provide enhanced security, compliance, and policy features including bring-your-own-key encryption, backup archiving, and compliance with regional data sovereignty requirements.

Watch the Sessions Online

In addition to the above major feature announcements, GitHub Satellite 2020 had a large number of session being presented at the conference. Being a virtual event, the keynotes and sessions have been recorded and are available for your streaming enjoyment.

You can view the full list of sessions with links to watch them on-demand at the official GitHub Satellite website at: https://githubsatellite.com

Happy learning and growing through GitHub and Open Source!

About the Author

Chris Pietschmann

Chris Pietschmann is a Microsoft MVP, HashiCorp Ambassador, and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) with 20+ years of experience designing and building Cloud & Enterprise systems. He has worked with companies of all sizes from startups to large enterprises. He has a passion for technology and sharing what he learns with others to help enable them to learn faster and be more productive.