GitHub Universe

11:10 am

Tree-sitter: a new parsing system for programming tools

- Max Brunsfeld, GitHub

Developer tools that support multiple languages generally have very limited regex-based code-analysis capabilities. Tree-sitter is a new parsing system that aims to change this paradigm. We're in the process of integrating Tree-sitter into both GitHub.com and Atom, which will allow us to analyze code accurately and in real-time, paving the way for better syntax highlighting, code navigation, and refactoring support. We'll demo some new features that Tree-sitter has enabled in GitHub.com and Atom, discuss its implementation, and share thoughts on ways it could be used in the future.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/max-brunsfeld.jpg

Max Brunsfeld

Application Engineer @ GitHub

12:00 pm

Interop's labyrinth: sharing code between web & Electron apps

- Machiste Quintana, Slack

2:50 pm

Tools as a catalyst for culture change

- Bill Higgins, IBM and Jason Warner, GitHub

People often say that in order to achieve sustainable excellence in software, you need to get the culture right. This is true, but at this level, not very actionable. Over our years of building and deploying tools to development teams, we have found that providing the right tools can act as a catalyst for positive culture change. When you provide the right tools to your development teams at scale, you show that you’re serious about changing the way they work. When you help teams learn and master the modern practices that the tools enable, your teams get better at their craft. Your investment in tools and practices help create an environment that attracts and retains top talent. This is all easier said than done, and in this 40 minute panel discussion Bill Higgins, IBM Distinguished Engineer, along with Jason Warner, SVP of Technology of GitHub, discuss concrete strategies for rolling out great tools at scale, including: choosing the right tools, finding and empowering user champions, enabling effective continuous learning (in the context of doing work), gaining the support of senior leadership. Bill and Jason have many years of experience building and deploying tools, and now work closely together on the evolution of GitHub for Business and using GitHub at IBM.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/jason-warner.jpg

Jason Warner

Senior VP of Technology @ GitHub

/assets/img/universe/speakers/bill-higgins.jpg

Bill Higgins

Distinguished Engineer @ IBM

4:00 pm

Quickly build a collaborative CMS powered by the GitHub API

- David Stolarsky, The New York Times

At The New York Times we have built an entire CMS in which the only stateful layer is the GitHub API. This vastly simplifies our infrastructure setup and maintenance, and gives us powerful primitives on which to build a collaborative content editing system used by writers, designers, photographers, editors, and even web developers. In this talk you will learn: how The New York Times uses the GitHub API to store documents in the CMS's intermediate format, how we support collaborative editing via the GitHub API, how we catalog our posts via the GitHub API, how we are able to support legacy ("custom") development at the same time, and how the GitHub ecosystem, e.g. CI services empower our CMS even further.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/David-Stolarsky.jpg

David Stolarsky

Software Engineer @ The New York Times

4:50 pm

Using GitHub's GraphQL API to manage open source projects

- Brian Douglas, Netlify

GraphQL is a legitimate way to build and consume APIs with less front end frustration. It has only been out of developer preview but truly shaking up the way front-end and mobile applications are being developed. Getting into open source projects can be a daunting process, and there are a lot of existing tools out there to assist in getting your first open source pull request including Code Triage, IssueHub, and of course firstpr.me. Open Sauced is one more tool to help by providing a platform to organize notes on potential projects the user has not yet contributed to by leveraging the now public GitHub GraphQL API. This talk will compare the GraphQL benefits over REST and walk through the implementation of live code implementing the open source GraphQL features using the Apollo project.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/Brian-Douglas.jpg

Brian Douglas

Web Developer @ Netlify

11:10 am

Electron: keeping an ion it

- Shelley Vohr and Zeke Sikelianos, GitHub

In this session we'll take a high-level look at the Electron project. First, we'll kick off with a lightning presentation to illustrate what Electron is and how it works. Then we'll have a fireside chat with two members of GitHub's Electron team, addressing some of the most common questions we hear from the Electron community. The content should be useful to existing Electron developers as well as people just learning about the project.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/shelley-vohr.png

Shelley Vohr

Application Engineer, Electron @ GitHub

/assets/img/universe/speakers/zeke.jpg

Zeke Sikelianos

Electron Engineer @ GitHub

12:00 pm

Algorithmic biases in AI and machine learning

- Terri Burns, Twitter

Last year, NPR did a story answering the question, can computers be racist? (Yes.) Not soon after, Microsoft launched an AI chatbot experiment, called Tay, which shut down when the software began spewing hateful speech online. One of the known fears of AI and machine learning is the notion of algorithmic bias, which can create or indirectly allow machines to learn prejudiced behavior. In this talk, we will explore what it really means to “teach” a computer to have prejudices, and what can happen product managers, designers, and engineers are not cognizant of their own biases. Appropriate for both technical and non-technical audiences. What Attendees Can Expect to Learn: Examples of “bad” computing, how personal beliefs and prejudice can manifest in code and product development, and ways to avoid personal bias in algorithms and products.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/terri-burns.jpg

Terri Burns

Associate Product Manager @ Twitter

2:50 pm

Tracking and automating software infrastructure with GitHub

- John Arthorne, Shopify

Our company was steadily growing the number of production services, to the point where we had several hundred running web applications, most of which had poorly defined ownership and ad-hoc infrastructure. These applications had a patchwork of tools such as build and deployment automation, monitoring, alerting, and load testing, but with very little consistency and lots of gaps. This talk will dive into our approach to infrastructure automation, which involved integrating our GitHub repositories with automation tools through a common infrastructure database. This automation tracks required actions for service owners through GitHub Issues, and generates pull requests for common configuration and software changes. This talk will summarize lessons learned and how to leverage GitHub APIs and web hooks to build similar infrastructure automation tools.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/john-arthorne.jpg

John Arthorne

Production Engineering Lead @ Shopify

4:00 pm

Building diverse data communities with Jupyter Notebooks

- Frances Haugen and Patrick Phelps, Pinterest

How do Jupyter Notebooks change how data intensive teams work? How do we build heterogeneous data communities? This talk focuses on how the analytical teams at Pinterest adopted Jupyter Notebook and Jupyter Server and how it changed how analysis is undertaken and communicated. We'll discuss the social side of data science and why unifying data acquisition, analysis, and presentation fundamentally changes the way insights are generated. Tradeoffs between ease-of-use and reusable code production will also be covered along with security implications of adoption in an enterprise context.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/frances-haugen.jpg

Frances Haugen

Data Product Manager @ Pinterest

/assets/img/universe/speakers/patrick-phelps.jpg

Patrick Phelps

Head of Ads Data Science @ Pinterest

4:50 pm

Mine the music: searching efficiently with open source

- Flora Dai, Pandora

Today, data is produced on a massive scale but the ability to retrieve real-time data with accuracy and efficiency is essential to utilize the information we store. We will discuss how to implement an efficient search with open-source technologies and how Pandora applied it to music curation.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/flora-dai.jpg

Flora Dai

Software Engineer @ Pandora

11:10 am

Building a better browser engine on GitHub

- E. Dunham, Mozilla

The Servo browser engine, written in Rust, is a Mozilla initiative to test novel approaches to rendering the web and build components to improve Firefox. This talk is a tour through the infrastructure that powers Servo's development, showing how the project leverages GitHub to build a welcoming and highly productive international community. After this talk you'll understand how Servo gets the most out of GitHub and hopefully be inspired to improve your own projects with ideas from our tooling and culture as well.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/e-dunham.jpg

E. Dunham

DevOps Engineer @ Mozilla

12:00 pm

How legal Hubbers GitHub

- Meena Polich & Brooke Roundy, GitHub

Presented by Meena Polich, Managing Ops Counsel and Brooke Roundy, Legal Project Manager at GitHub, we’ll show you how our legal team uses GitHub. To most, GitHub is a platform by engineers, for engineers. The truth is, anyone can be a developer. Our legal team has embraced using GitHub to pioneer innovative legal practices for our business. We’re going to give you an overview and brief demo on why and how we use GitHub. The beauty of the platform is that anyone can learn how to use it. We’re going to show you how legal professionals can use GitHub to collaborate meaningfully, building the best businesses and software in the world.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/meena-polich.jpg

Meena Polich

Managing Operations Counsel @ GitHub

/assets/img/universe/speakers/brooke-roundy.jpg

Brooke Roundy

Legal Project Manager and Policy Analyst @ GitHub

2:50 pm

The unbearable vulnerability of open source

- Eileen Uchitelle, GitHub

If contributing to open source was only about writing code, it would be easy. In reality open source exposes our insecurities and makes us feel vulnerable. Vulnerability can inspire change, but can also paralyze us for fear of not being good enough. In this talk we'll look at how vulnerability affects open source contributors and explore how maintainers can foster a welcoming community. Contributors will learn how to identify projects with empathetic leaders who value GitHub’s community standards. Cultivating a better environment for contributing makes open source more sustainable for all.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/eileen-uchitelle.jpg

Eileen Uchitelle

Senior Systems Engineer, Ruby Performance @ GitHub

4:00 pm

No excuses: if government can open source, so can you

- Sara Cope, GSA

Open source has become a key part of almost every software solution and is at the center of many of today’s innovations. However, it’s still considered the primary domain of foundations and smaller projects. It’s time to give enterprise OSS a seat at the table and embrace enterprise mixed source development environments where open source, proprietary products and internal code exist alongside each other. The General Services Administration (GSA), part of the US federal government, is leading the open source adoption efforts across government in spite of numerous bureaucratic hurdles; so if we can do it, you can too. In this talk, the GSA Digital Service team will dig into the challenges encountered when adopting enterprise-level OSS and creating a culture of “Open First”. We’ll take a look at policy development, creating a code inventory, conducting code scans for new development, establishing an internal open source community and more.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/sara-cope.jpg

Sara Cope

Front End Developer @ U.S. General Services Administration

4:50 pm

Nationwide's GitHub conversion - no IT project needed

- Cindy Payne and Jim Grafmeyer, Nationwide

Once the hard benefits of GitHub are established and GitHub is your enterprise standard tool, how do you convert thousands of users and code repositories in less than a year without an IT project? At Nationwide, GitHub has been seen as a catalyst for the DevOps culture and practices. So walk the DevOps talk with your enterprise GitHub migration and ditch the traditional IT project. Learn everything Nationwide did differently for this enterprise tool roll-out and how it's accelerating delivery.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/cindy-payne.jpg

Cindy Payne

Leader of Nationwide's Tech Consulting Group @ Nationwide

/assets/img/universe/speakers/jim-grafmeyer.jpg

Jim Grafmeyer

Digital Solutions Architect @ Nationwide

11:10 am

Queer youth vs. technology

- Monica Arrambide, Maven

With social media apps, digital photo enhancement at your fingertips, video capturing on your phone and 24hr virtual connecting, have you ever wonder what impact this technology has on a developing mind? What about a young person questioning their sexual identities and/or gender identity? When youth are becoming digital architects of a virtual self that has all the tech tool power of creating, editing and enhancing, what happens to the “real you?” The theme of this talk is about social awareness of tech impact on a young developing mind. With virtual spaces having unlimited access to youth, we need to create conversations on social responsibility with tech inventions. What policies and safeguards can the tech sector agree to implement when creating new tech tools? In the real world we have strict regulations in regards to what youth have access to (smoking, driving, porn, etc.), while the virtual world there is no strict regulations our outlines for youth.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/monica-arrambide.jpg

Monica Arrambide

CEO & Founder @ Maven

12:00 pm

Building, scaling, and selling GitHub integrations

- Kyle Daigle, GitHub

GitHub has a vibrant ecosystem of developer tools that our customers use every day. When the API launched 8 years ago, a few small integrations started to build businesses on top of GitHub's Platform. Today, there are thousands of tools that build on-top of GitHub to provide unique features and functionality to GitHub customers. In this session, we'll share best practices from some of GitHub's integration partners, lessons in scaling integrations for open source, business, and enterprise customers, and discuss how to sell your integration in GitHub Marketplace. You'll leave this talk with some tips for building a SAAS business on a thriving Platform like GitHub.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/kyle-daigle.jpg

Kyle Daigle

Senior API Engineering Manager @ GitHub

2:50 pm

Building a tech community within an African society

- Konrad Djimeli, GitHub Campus Expert

This talk is mainly about the Silicon Mountain community which is know to be Cameroon's largest growing tech community. Silicon Mountain is located in Buea, in the South-West region of Cameroon just at the foot of the Mount Fako. This community is still very new and has gone through some refinement to get to where it is now. This talk provides some insight on how technology is being used to solve problems in this part of the world, the problems we are facing and how we are overcoming them against all odds. The community hopes to have a huge impact in technology within Africa and also in the world.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/konrad-djimeli.jpg

Konrad Djimeli

Computer Science Student @ GitHub Campus Expert

4:00 pm

Why I decided to become a superhero of the social world

- Alicia Carr, PEVO

This talk is about underlying women's issues and how they can be solved with tech. PEVO is a national domestic violence app created to ensure women and victims have the right resources in their hand. PEVO is designed to educate women on their rights and alternatives on what to do and how to know if they are being victims of Domestic Violence. The app includes information on employment rights, immigration, shelters, etc. and is available in 6 different languages: English, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Urdu and Hindi.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/alicia-carr.jpg

Alicia Carr

Founder @ PEVO

4:50 pm

The emotionally fit leader

- Dr. Emily Anhalt

The tech industry is realizing more and more that in order for a company to grow, employees must grow as individuals. Humans are emotional beings, and we bring our humanity with us to work every single day. This translates into the product that is being made, which is felt by those using the product. In Silicon Valley, where so much of the culture and community is rooted in the tech scene, having emotionally fit and healthy leaders and employees will have a hugely important ripple effect on society. Intended Audience: This talk is for anyone working in tech who wants to better understand the intersection of their emotional and occupational selves. It is for anyone who has worked with someone who seemed to be leaking their personal issues into the job. It is especially useful for anyone in a leadership position at work.

/assets/img/universe/speakers/emily-anhalt.jpeg

Dr. Emily Anhalt

Professional Psychologist