[SGVLUG] 12/9 Meeting Recap: GitHub

[Lan Dang]

Hi all,
tl;dr Fabulous meeting thanks to Jamie and Michelle from GitHub.  Learned a lot about GitHub offerings and definitely felt their  love for GitHub and their desire to collaborate with us on other meetings.  We were offered a code to get GitHub swag; I will forward that to the Meetup attendees when I get it.  Wonderful post-meeting discussions and afterparty at Du-Par's.  Thanks to OpenX for hosting -- particularly Derek for organizing, and Alan for helping with set up and Mark for showing his support.  Jess and John are my LUG heroes.
NOTE: If you skim to the GitHub talk section, I've added helpful links for some of the items discussed, as well as a link to GitHub Universe.  


CONSTRUCTION CONFUSION========================
I apologize to those of you who were unable to find your way to the meeting room.  I'd hoped the map would be sufficient, but I did not expect the existing signage to confuse everyone. 

We ended up with a smaller group than normal -- I counted about 26, including our speakers and OpenXers.  I heard from Bill later at Du-Par's, that we had lost some attendees because they had ended up at an elevator with no idea where to go next.

The building is under renovation with blocked off construction areas.   I have no idea who was responsible for the set of arrows in blue tape on the floors and door--I think it was for the tenants of the building.  OpenX had put some signage to point us to a particular door, but most of us ended up on Walnut St, peering through the glass windows until we saw the area where there was light and activity.  If there is still construction the next time we meet there, I will try to develop SGVLUG signage, so it's more clear what should be done.  I'm usually better about this, but it has been a really long week at work, punctuated by much uncertainty about whether we would have a speaker.


BEHIND THE SCENES=================

Despite my expectations, we had a really great meeting.  I will take you a little behind the scenes, because it was a challenging meeting to organize, and I really really appreciated everyone who stepped up to make it work.  

OPENXFirst off, thank you Derek for being our new contact at OpenX and being proactive in organizing things on the OpenX end.  Many of our previous contacts had left, so I wasn't sure if we still had the same connection to OpenX.  But when we arrived on Thursday, we saw some familiar faces, and the same familiar setup and got a sense that they wanted to continue to host our meetings.  Alan made sure we were set up and explained the A/V.  I have Mark's business card and maybe he will give us a talk on Salt and SaltStack one day.  There were some OpenXers in the audience as well.
GITHUB
Huge thanks go to Jamie Wetzel and Michelle Unger for stepping in at the last minute, when first our original speaker and then our substitute speaker had to cancel due to circumstances beyond their control.  (I have never appreciated how terrible San Francisco is about flight delays until yesterday, when flight after flight got cancelled or delayed, pretty much sinking our chances of Jennie getting here on time.)  To recognize how last-minute this was--at 4pm, I had pretty much resigned myself to not having a speaker and was trying to  figure out how to tell everyone who had been expecting a GitHub talk that it wasn't going to happen.   But Jamie told me he had my back, and he did.  I think Michelle and Jamie had to separately drive an hour and two hours, respectively to get to us.
So we also have to thank Mic for dragging Jamie to one of our LUG meetings, thereby establishing a personal connection to us.  I find that having the personal connection really helps when things go FUBAR.

SGVLUG
I thank the folks on the #sgvlug IRC for being there for me to angst to.  It is nice not to feel alone in this.  Jess was emcee and prepared a great Linux in the News.  John made his awesome SGVLUG/SGVHAK phone stands as speaker/host gifts to give Jamie, Michelle, and Derek, so I felt less bad about the ginormous email chains and uncertainty and L.A. traffic they had to deal with.  

I also appreciate Richard and Geoff coming to talk to me about becoming involved in the administrative side of LUG.We reorganized the LUG a few years ago  to be more decentralized.  We need to do a little reorganization soon because we are currently approaching a bus factor of 1.
It is not a huge amount of work, aside from the occasional challenge of coordinating a venue or a speaker.  But it is incredibly stressful to feel like the only one responsible for it.  As I get older, I really appreciate the importance of having a team who can be the extra set of hands when you're busy elsewhere, and who you can talk to when you're trying to solve a problem.
GITHUB TALK===========Michelle gave us a really nice general talk on GitHub.  We learned  that they have quarterly releases, delivering first to GitHub.com for about three months before being rolled up into a release for GitHub Enterprise.  GitHub.com makes a good proving ground.  We learned that Hubbers, as they call themselves, use GitHub extensively themselves, and they dogfood the new features before the rest of us.


More and more people are using GitHub as an online resume, so they added features to give more control and customization of your GitHub profile.  

There is more support for code review, establishing gatekeeping protection for merging, and project management and multifactor authentication.  

We learned a little about their API and where to find extensive documentation and sample code: http://developer.github.com./   They provide the octokit library (open sourced) for Ruby, .Net, and Obj-C.  There are third party libraries with support for other languages like Python.   Use cases for the API might be to assist in user management, to send out reminders for things like open issues, to search repositories for plaintext passwords, to build a chat bot to integrate with Slack or Jenkins.
The favorite GitHub bot is hubot, which can be used for work, but is most often used for "life embetterment" activities like telling you what the best food truck options are near your work place.https://hubot.github.com/
Webhooks are like a reverse API and provide event-based triggers.  It is the complete opposite of polling, which is inefficient.  Use cases are pull request-driven continuous integration, chatops, or implementing checks on commits post-push to screen for sensitive information.
They also support a number of integrations with other software and services.  They have a curated listing at http://github.com/integrations
They offer various training options from self-paced tutorials to free instructor-led webinars 
https://services.github.com/

We had a good Q&A session where I got some of my GitHub and GitHub Enterprise questions answered.  We found out, though it's not surprising, that Hubbers are some of the top contributors to git, as well.

FUTURE GITHUB COLLABORATIONS=============================They offered us a coupon code for GitHub swag.  When I get it, I'll distribute it to the Meetup attendees.  

Michelle and Jamie would be happy to help line up more speakers for us, whether it is GitHub, git, or even how the companies they support do development or open source.  They could also provide support if we were to do something like a hackathon.
They are also interested in starting up a GitHub user group.  I think it's a good idea because while I enjoy learning more about GitHub, I don't think LUG would appreciate 3 straight months of presentations on Git and GitHub.  I've encouraged them to lean east because I find it really hard to motivate myself to leave work early enough to attend meetings on the west side.

Also, they had a GitHub conference back in September called GitHub Universe.  If you missed it, as I did, the videos are online here.  I was quite interested in some of the topics.  Now if I coud
http://githubuniverse.com/program/sessions/



POST-MEETING FUN================After the meeting, there were a lot of small discussions happening between various people, which is one of the reasons I enjoy our LUG meetings.  I kicked everyone out fairly early so we could have dinner at Du-Par's at a reasonable hour.  There were 8-10 of us there.  It was a lot of fun.  

I found out that Margo is back at Du-Par's.  She was our original server when we meet at Du-Par's, but she had been out for a while for medical reasons.  


Lan

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