GitHub Universe 2024, what a blast!

Last week, I had the privilege of attending GitHub Universe in San Francisco with my team.
This was a week that created a lasting memory. We flew in on Saturday with most of the crew and started to prepare ourselves for the event. We had a Gold Sponsorship, meaning we would be in the main exhibition area, and we showed up with some really cool prizes to win.

The booth Game we came up with was Buzz the Wire. When you made it to the end of the wire without tripping the buzzer, you won a cool T-shirt and a raffle ticket to enter the prize draw to win a very cool Packman Lego set.

We also had a secret raffle around Mona. One of the kids from our team has built an octocat with Lego.
This was so cool, and so many people asked us about the Lego piece we showed at the booth. the moment someone asked about it, they could enter into our secret raffle where the winner would win the actual Lego piece to take with them!

All in all, around 500 people visited our booth. We chatted with many organizations that are using GitHub or moving to GitHub. We shared our insights into how to do a proper migration, how to enable your organization with Copilot, and how to start using GitHub advanced security to improve the security posture around your code.

Hanging out with so many talented people

Many of the attendees wanted to chat with our experts, whom we brought with us. People showed up with some of the things they run into, and often, it took us a few minutes to help them out and unblock them on their technical challenges. It is great to be among so many talented people who know all the nuts and bolts of GitHub and work closely with GitHub engineers on new and existing features.

Learning new GitHub capabilities

Of course, there were also the sessions we could attend. There were many sessions where you could learn more about using GitHub or hear from other partners and customers sharing how they use GitHub, tackle some of their organizational challenges, and use GitHub in a scaled way.

During the Keynote we got introductions to the new capabilities that GitHub now provides. Some of the things that stood out to me are:

• GitHub Models
  This is a way to use a playground environment and work with all kinds of different language models. The option to see how the same prompt would result in results side by side using different models is very helpful when you are trying to integrate AI into your own software. GitHub models are now available for everyone, and you can start experimenting immediately.
• Copilot Model Selection
  GitHub now offers integration with many more Large Language models, meaning you can now also switch the GitHub Copilot chat environment and see if a different model will give you better results. Very cool and useful, especially with so many new models coming to market every few weeks. this is the ideal way to not be locked in one model and experiment with what works best given your application, coding language, and specific asks to the copilot chat.
• Copilot Multifile edit
• With multi-file editing, we can use the Copilot chat functionality and reference multiple files it needs to consider and modify in your workspace. These edits are applied directly in the editor, and you can quickly review them in the full context of the surrounding code. this is a significant time saver when you need to make the same kind of changes to multiple documents.
• Pull Request integration with Workspace
  With Copilot Workspace in pull requests, you can now rapidly refine, validate, and use Copilot-generated code suggestions as a code review. It also provides a way to auto-fix comments. This should really help the speed at which we can get a pull request approved and integrated into your main codebase.

The release of our book Actions in Action

This was epic for Rob Bos, Michael Kaufmann, and me since we finally received the printed versions of our books.



We spent about 18 months to get this book published. It was the first part of the Mannings MEAP  team members help us in the review process. Last but not least, we got Scott Hanselman to write the foreword for our book; how cool is that! It was also so much fun to hand out the first signed copies to our friends at GitHub, and as you can see, they are all thrilled to receive their own personal copy 🙂



Winning the Global Partner of the Year award

We have been a GitHub partner for many years now. This started when Microsoft acquired GitHub and I had the opportunity to see firsthand the vision of Microsoft’s wanting to take this newly acquired DevOps platform. Being on Azure DevOps since its first incarnation as Visual Studio Team System made me at first a bit reluctant to move, but after talking with people such as Nat Friedman, who shared their vision and innovation going forward, we made a conscious decision, we at the Xebia Microsoft Services will be a GitHub first company. This resulted already in us becoming the first GitHub-verified partner back in 2019, and from there, we went on a journey where we helped numerous customers migrate and adopt GitHub as their core platform for engineering. On top of this, we added our concepts of how to build an engineering culture that goes way beyond the tools but always has GitHub at its core to drive innovation. We received the GitHub Global Partner of the Year award, which was a crown for all the work we have done together. We even won in multiple categories, and as part of the award, we got invited to have lunch with the leadership team. This was also a fantastic experience and an encouragement for us to come up with more ways to work and help organizations improve their software delivery with GitHub and AI at their core.



Being named the best-dressed team at Universe

You might already have seen, if you look at the pictures in this post, that we all showed up in our tailor-made Xebia GitHub Universe swag. We all had jackets, t-shirts, and shoes that matched. This did not go unnoticed at the event. People asked us multiple times how they could also get the jacket and complimented us on how nice it looked. It was new to me, getting compliments on my clothes, but I gladly took them. During the interview we did with GitHub, we also got asked about our clothing and how it came that we showed up like this.


Conclusion

GitHub Universe 2024 was an event that will be in my memories for many more years to come. I learned a ton of new things in tech, got to catch up with many of my friends in the industry, released our book, and received the Partner of the Year award. All of this would not have been possible without our amazing team at Xebia, and I want to thank them all for being so awesome!