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Yesterday, GitHub commenced its popular product conference GitHub Universe 2019 in San Francisco. The two-day annual conference celebrates the contribution of GitHub’s 40+ million developers and their contributions to the open source community. Day 1 of the conference had many interesting announcements like GitHub for mobile, GitHub Archive Program, and more.

Let’s look at some of the major announcements at the GitHub Universe 2019 conference.

GitHub for mobile iOS (beta)

Github for mobile is a beta app that aims to give users the flexibility to work and interact with the team, anywhere they want. This will enable users to share feedback on a design discussion or review codes in a non-complex development environment. This native app will adapt to any screen size and will also work in dark mode based on the device preference. Currently available only on iOS, the GitHub team has said that it will soon come up with the Android version of it.

GitHub Archive Program

“Our world is powered by open source software. It’s a hidden cornerstone of our civilization and the shared heritage of all humanity. The mission of the GitHub Archive Program is to preserve it for generations to come,” states the official GitHub blog.

GitHub has partnered with the Stanford Libraries, the Long Now Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Software Heritage Foundation, Piql, Microsoft Research, and the Bodleian Library to preserve all the available open source code in the world. It will safeguard all the data by storing multiple copies across various data formats and locations. This includes a “very-long-term archive” called the GitHub Arctic Code Vault which is designed to last at least 1,000 years.

Read More: GitHub Satellite 2019 focuses on community, security, and enterprise

Automating workflows from code to cloud

General availability of GitHub Actions

Last year, at the GitHub Universe conference, GitHub Actions was announced in beta. This year, GitHub has made it generally available to all the users. In the past year, GitHub Actions has received contributions from the developers of AWS, Google, and others. Actions has now developed as a new standard for building and sharing automation for software development, including a CI/CD solution and native package management.GitHub has also announced the free use of self-hosted runners and artifact caching.

General availability of GitHub Packages

In May this year, GitHub had announced the beta version of the GitHub Package Registry as its new package management service. Later in September, after gathering community feedback, GitHub announced that the service has proxy support for the primary npm registry.

Since its launch, GitHub Package has received over 30,000 unique packages that served the needs of over 10,000 organizations. Now, at the GitHub Universe 2019, the GitHub team has announced the general availability of GitHub Packages and also informed that they have added support for using the GitHub Actions token.

These were some of the major announcements at day 1 of the GitHub Universe 2019 conference, head over to GitHub’s blog for more details of the event.

Tech workers protests against GitHub’s ICE contract

Major product announcements aside, one thing that garnered a lot of attention at the GitHub Universe conference was the protest conducted by the GitHub workers along with the Tech Workers Coalition to oppose GitHub’s $200,000 contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many high-profile speakers have dropped out of the GitHub Universe 2019 conference and at least five GitHub employees have resigned from GitHub due to its support for ICE.

Read More: Largest ‘women in tech’ conference, Grace Hopper Celebration, renounces Palantir as a sponsor due to concerns over its work with the ICE

Yesterday at the event, the protesting tech workers brought a giant cage to symbolize how ICE uses them to detain migrant children.

Tech workers around the world have extended their support to the protest against GitHub.

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Vincy Davis
A born storyteller turned writer!