Meet GitHub Enterprise at DevOps Enterprise Summit
November 16, 2022
Christopher Harrison
Senior Enterprise Advocate, GitHub
Recently myself and a handful of teammates attended DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas. It gave us an amazing opportunity to have conversations with developers, managers and leaders, all looking to improve their DevOps skills and processes.
A common conversation topic was how to improve developer velocity. There are numerous ways to do this, through streamlining processes, providing good tooling, and removing barriers and tedious tasks. It's the last one I want to focus on.
There's countless hours (and sometimes days) lost by developers when setting up their machines when they want to contribute to a project for the first time. Between downloading the necessary libraries, installing tooling, dealing with version conflicts, it's a challenge. GitHub Codespaces offers the ability to run a fully configured development container in the cloud which your dev team can connect to with Visual Studio Code, locally or in a browser window. All development and compute takes place in the container in the cloud, freeing your developers from the setup process!
The second, and the one I'm personally most excited about, is GitHub Copilot. Copilot is an AI pair programmer. Copilot suggests code based on the comments and code the developer writes. It looks at the context and frameworks it uses to guide the suggestions; if you're using React it'll generate React code! Copilot is wonderful for automating the generation of boilerplate code like data models, writing regular expressions, and other uncommon syntax you might typically look up on Stack Overflow. This frees developers from having to leave their IDE (and flow) or tedious code, allowing them to focus on solving the difficult problems you brought them onto your team to solve.
If you want to explore more, you can see the top 6 DevOps pitfalls and how to solve them.