GitHub announces several new tools and capabilities to improve developer experience

Last month, GitHub made a major announcement. To make GitHub more accessible for developers around the world, GitHub announced that private repositories with unlimited collaborators with all of the core GitHub features are now free for everyone. Today, GitHub announced several new tools and features to significantly improve the developer experience for both individual developers and businesses.

• GitHub Codespaces, a new product aimed to make it easier than ever to get coding—allowing developers to join a project, launch a developer environment, and be fully configured in just seconds. On a related note, Microsoft recently announced Visual Studio Codespaces. Visual Studio Codespaces provides cloud-powered development environments for any activity. GitHub Codespaces is powered by Visual Studio Codespaces.
  • Codespaces in GitHub include a browser-based version of the full VS Code editor, with support for code completion and navigation, extensions, terminal access, and more. If you prefer to use your desktop IDE, you will be able to start a codespace in GitHub and connect to it from your desktop.
• GitHub Discussions, a new feature that makes it possible for open source communities to have conversations right where their community already exists—on GitHub.
  • Discussions live in your project repository, so they’re accessible where your community is already working together. Their threaded format makes it easy to start, respond to, and organize unstructured conversations. Questions can be marked as answered, so over time a community’s knowledge base grows naturally.
• GitHub Advanced Security, with new native cloud features including code scanning and secret scanning, to help automate security directly into the developer workflow.
  • Code scanning is now available as a GitHub native experience. With code scanning enabled, every `git push` is scanned for new potential security vulnerabilities, and results are displayed directly in your pull request. Code scanning uses the world’s most
    advanced semantic analysis engine, CodeQL, which has an unmatched record finding real vulnerabilities.
  • Secret scanning is now available for private repositories. This feature (formerly named token scanning) has been available for public repositories since 2018.
• GitHub Private Instances, our most secure and compliant offering for enterprises operating in highly-regulated industries.
  • Private Instances provides enhanced security, compliance, and policy features including bring-your-own-key encryption, backup
    archiving, and compliance with regional data sovereignty requirements.

Source: GitHub