Changelog

I agree — “GitHub is, quite simply, home for developers,” as stated by James Governor in his highlights post on GitHub Universe 2018. Out the gate, James focuses on the announcement of GitHub Actions, which “feels like a profound launch, one that could prove extremely disruptive in the long term.” An idea that seems to have started as “Probot” is now a full fledged and more approachable product offering called GitHub Actions, and looks like it will continue to drive more and developers, developers, developers to GitHub in 2019. Quite simply, Actions could be a disruption driving feature. So what about future implications of Actions for AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP Cloud compute platforms? Actions could even pose a threat to the centrality and stickiness of the cloud console, because If developers can drive all their workflows from GitHub they have less need to use the console. It might seem absurd to position GitHub as an AWS competitor … but there is no denying the potential for GitHub to lessen the primacy of a cloud operator console in favor of Actions scripted in GitHub, triggering actions and deployments across multiple clouds. GitHub used its keynote to demonstrate the ability to deploy a workload across multiple clouds. Mark your calendars for November 28th! We’re releasing a new episode on The Changelog talking GitHub Actions with Kyle Daigle, Director of Ecosystem Engineering at GitHub, and one of the leaders to bring Actions to fruition. Stay tuned!

This week on the Facebook code blog they shared details about a new tool called Getafix that automatically finds fixes for bugs and offers them to engineers to approve. 😎 Modern production codebases are extremely complex and are updated constantly. To create a system that can automatically find fixes for bugs — without help from engineers — we built Getafix to learn from engineers’ previous changes to the codebase. It finds hidden patterns and uses them to identify the most likely remediations for new bugs. Getafix has been deployed to production at Facebook, where it now contributes to the stability of apps that billions of people use. The goal of Getafix is to let computers take care of the routine work, albeit under the watchful eye of a human, who must decide when a bug requires a complex, nonroutine remediation. Whether or not this tool will be open sourced or shared at large remains to be seen. How cool would it be to have something like this deployed to your codebase to find and suggest fixes to your bugs?