The GitHub Blog

GitHub's Supportocat Superteam is excited to welcome beer authority (and Michael Jackson fangirl) Emily Gould!

The theme of Emily's Supportocat origin story is connecting people with what they need. Coming to us fresh from the world of professional beer and wine expertise, she's also taught English in Germany, organized community support for Baltimore public schools, and organized fundraising events (like the Spaghetti Disco) for an inner-city library. Yes, yet another librarian! Didn't you know librarians are closely related to octo-felis scintillula?

Emily is now rescuing Accounts In Distress, based out of her top secret empathy lab in Dallas, TX. Her other superpowers include:

• honeyed words that sweeten even the most sour situations
• secreting diaphanous bug-catching filaments from her fingertips
• defeating every brisket she meets

Stay tuned for Emily's further adventures on GitHub and Twitter.

We're excited to welcome Joe Williams to the GitHub Operations team this week!

Joe likes to ride his bicycle in the woods, on the roads, through the mud, up mountains, down mountains, and just about everywhere else too. When he's not dropping the hammer, Joe can be found automating servers by the peloton. Joe's passion for distributed systems, queuing theory, and spotting a false flat will be invaluable as we continue to scale our backend systems.

Joe currently resides in Seattle, WA where as you might imagine, he rides bikes. You can follow Joe on GitHub and Twitter.

We are pleased to welcome @brianburridge to the team. Brian brings his ample development skills and years of experience to GitHub to assist the Training Team in our ever-expanding goal to teach the world.

Brian lives in Tampa Bay, Florida with his wife and two children. Some fun facts about him:

• He has spent the last five years as the developer for Miley Cyrus's fan club site.
• He founded CommendableKids.com during the 2010 Rails Rumble.
• He regularly attends and reviews movies.
• He is a Florida Gators fan.
• No, seriously: he hasn't missed watching or listening to a Gator football game since 1988. He even famously worked his wedding and honeymoon schedule around Gator constraints. This guy is in it to win it.
• He is a first-degree black belt in Tang Soo Do, which was awarded to him by Grand Master Kim. Grand Master Kim also trained Chuck Norris. No, we are not making this up.
• Oh yeah, don't forget the red belt in Filipino Arnis.

You can follow him on GitHub, Twitter, and his blog.

It's been a week since GitHub has visited Scotland socially, so to break the drought we're throwing a drinkup in Dundee. We'll buy the and you bring your best tech, design, and dev conversation. Deal?

Join me Friday at Drouthy's talking all things GitHub.

The Facts:

• When: Friday, August 30 at 7:30pm
• Where: Drouthy's - 142-146 Perth Road, Dundee, United Kingdom
• How: When you arrive, say "Hi" to me, @michaeltwofish. (I'll be wearing a GitHub hoodie.)

We are pleased to announce that this year's OctoGala, GitHub's annual black-tie charity event, will take place on September 19 at the Fairmont Hotel.

Tickets are $100 for a single ticket, and $175 for couples. All proceeds from ticket sales will go to Year Up, this year's charity of choice.

Year Up’s mission is to provide young adults in low income and marginalized communities with the skills and support that they need to reach their full potential in their professional careers. Participants in Year Up's program are taught technical skills such as programming, in addition to communication techniques that will enable them to succeed in the workforce. We admire their vision and think it's in perfect alignment with GitHub's goal of helping people to work better, together.

So dress to the nines, grab a date (or just rock it stag), enjoy a drink and dance the night away in the Crown Room, featuring a stunning, panoramic view of San Francisco. We've got some special stuff planned - can't wait to see you there!

The Facts:

• Thursday, September 19 at the Fairmont Hotel
• 950 Mason St
• Doors open at 8:00 PM, party ends at midnight
• Tickets available on Tito.io

With 8(!) of us in Tokyo, it only made sense to throw a drinkup. Come out to OFFICE for on us this Thursday.

OFFICE is right around the corner from the Ginza line's Gaiemmae station, exit 3. As you hit the sidewalk, look up and to the right for a bright, square green light. Walk around the corner of the building and climb the stairs up to the 5th floor, and you're there.

The Facts:

• When: this Thursday, August 29th, 7:30PM-10PM
• Where: Yamazaki Bldg 5F, 2-7-18 Kita-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo

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This Saturday, August 31st, 2013 at 5AM PDT we will be upgrading a large portion of our database infrastructure in order to provide a faster and more reliable GitHub experience.

We estimate that the upgrades should take no longer than 20 minutes. In order to minimize risk we will be putting the site into maintenance mode while the upgrade is performed. Thus, HTTP, API and Git access to GitHub.com will be unavailable for the duration of the upgrade.

We will update our status page and @githubstatus at the beginning of maintenance and again at the end.

As we continue to expand the infrastructure that powers GitHub, we want to make everyone aware of some changes to the IP addresses that we use. Most customers won't have to do anything as a result of these changes.

We mentioned these new addresses back in April and updated the Meta API to reflect them. Some GitHub services have have already been migrated to the new addresses, including:

• api.github.com
• gist.github.com
• ssh.github.com

Our next step is to begin using these IP addresses for the main GitHub site, so we're reminding everyone about this change. There are a few gotchas that might affect some people:

1. If you have explicit firewall rules in place that allow access to GitHub from your network, you'll want to make sure that all of the IP ranges listed in this article are included.
2. If you have an entry in your /etc/hosts file that points github.com at a specific IP address, you should remove it and instead rely on DNS to give you the most accurate set of addresses.
3. If you are accessing your repositories over the SSH protocol, you will receive a warning message each time your client connects to a new IP address for github.com. As long as the IP address from the warning is in the range of IP addresses in the previously mentioned Help page, you shouldn't be concerned. Specifically, the new addresses that are being added this time are in the range from 192.30.252.0 to 192.30.255.255. The warning message looks like this:

Warning: Permanently added the RSA host key for IP address '$IP' to the list of known hosts.

Thanks for your patience and continued support as we work to make GitHub faster and more reliable!

We're always looking at ways to improve security. Today's release of GitHub for Windows (version 1.0.54) improves password handling security through the use of OAuth tokens.

Prior to this release the application would encrypt and store your password. Since the application also registers itself as your Git credential provider, the app would provide your credentials in clear text to Git.exe whenever it asked for them.

With this release, when you log in with your username and password, the application registers itself on GitHub.com as an Authorized application and receives an OAuth token that it stores instead of your password. This is similar to how other applications that integrate with GitHub work such as Travis-CI.

Go to your account settings and click the Applications tab to see a list of authorized applications.

For a while now, GitHub has supported using Git over HTTPS with an OAuth token. Now, when Git requires your credentials, GitHub for Windows passes your OAuth token to Git.

One benefit of this approach is if someone steals your laptop, you can just go to the Applications tab and click the Revoke button to invalidate the current OAuth token. The thief can't retrieve your password from the contents of your hard-drive. The next time you log in, GitHub for Windows registers itself again and receives a newly generated OAuth token. Of course in this situation, it's still a good idea to change your password.

Enjoy more secure access to your GitHub account!

This week we're pleased to welcome Andy Lindeman to GitHub.

Hailing from Atlanta, you might know Andy as one of the maintainers of RSpec. Andy will be helping us measure and report on All The Things™ as the newest member of our analytics team. When he's not hacking, Andy likes getting into Georgia's great outdoors for running, backpacking, and ultimate Frisbee.

Follow Andy on GitHub and Twitter.

Following on the tails of 3D models and geographic data, GitHub.com now also supports rendering tabular data in the form of .csv (comma-separated) and .tsv (tab-separated) files.

When viewed, any .csv or .tsv file committed to a GitHub repository will automatically render as an interactive table, complete with headers and row numbering.

You can even link to a particular row simply by clicking the row number, or select multiple rows by holding down the shift key. Just copy the URL and send it to a friend.

Want to see if a certain value is in your dataset? Just start typing and the data filters itself.

Building software is about more than code. Whether analyzing a government dataset, comparing performance benchmarks, or parsing crash reports, working with tabular data on GitHub just got a little bit easier.

For more information, check out our help article.

Happy Analyzing!

@fromagie and I will be in Edinburgh this week for the Turing Festival. Come on down to the Summerhall courtyard bar this Friday for some on us!

The Facts:

• When: Friday, August 23rd, at 8:00pm.
• Where: Summerhall at 1 Summerhall, Edinburgh EH9 1QH
• How: Turing Festival folks will already have wristbands to get in. If you're not attending the festival, you can get your wristbands from the TechCube reception area before coming through to the Summerhall courtyard

See you there!

The GitHub Enterprise team will be at the CEDEC conference in Yokohama, Japan, this week. Please stop by to say hello, find out more about GitHub, and grab some of our stickers!

We'll also be hosting a drinkup on Thursday night at Cafe Vacation. Take a break from the August heat and enjoy a on us.

The Facts:

• When: Thursday, August 22nd, at 7:30pm.
• Where: Cafe Vacation at 4-40, Minaminakadori, Naka-ku, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa, 231-0006

Kàmpai!

Today we welcome Aziz Shamim to GitHub! Aziz actually started last week, but was having so much fun doing Ops with us that we didn't notice the week had ended! Aziz will be bringing his wealth of knowledge around automation and development to the Operations Team. Rumor has it, Aziz might be working on making computers smart enough with AI to make the best cup of coffee you'll ever drink.

When not designing sentient infrastructure, you can find Aziz in Nashville, TN enjoying some of the finer things in life: a good scotch, a great book, and a lively debate.

You can follow him on GitHub and Twitter.

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