Back in May we announced the availability of a hosted GitHub Actions runner for IBM Z and LinuxONE. Saying this is a big deal for me is a bit of an understatement. I’d been working on this project for nearly two years, and others involved had been working on things like .NET enablement on the platform to even open the door for this opportunity for much, much longer. Add on that it was delivered much later than expected and it’s been quite the beast. On the bright side, I’ve learned a ton from it, including a new respect for and understanding of effective project management. Plus, it’s really cool to see chugging along as we’re on-boarding lots of new projects each month!
To celebrate, I wanted to bring our success story and opportunity for projects to GitHub Universe this year. I was lucky that it was taking place in San Francisco, so there were no travel costs for me, and doubly lucky that the IBM team sponsoring the booth was willing to have me join them. It was a great experience working with the organizers and my fellow booth staff, we had representation from various parts of IBM so it was easy to direct attendees to someone helpful based on what they were interested in. For my part, I wish I had brought along a bigger sign saying something like “I give free stuff to OSS projects!” so the hobbyist contributors weren’t scared off by the more enterprise nature of IBM. Maybe next time. I was able to have some great conversations though, and could show off the work we’re doing with a screencast of the on-boarding process that I prepared on my tablet.
And I wasn’t the only mainframer there! Folks from Broadcom had a booth where they were showing off their Code4Z products that integrate into a standard VS Code environment.
It was a great event for me to be at to show off mainframe goodies to a distributed tech world that’s less accustomed to them. I was even able to clue in a few IBMers to the business we’re doing over in IBM Z land.
Personally, it was a wonderful event to be at to catch up with folks I haven’t seen in a while from across my tenure in open source.
I think my two biggest takeaways from the conference were 1. Wow, AI. and 2. How different conferences are when the talks aren’t necessarily the centerpiece.
Most of us in tech have a very different immediate relationship with AI than people in the general public. For us it’s less about results from ChatGPT and AI-created images, and more about what AI that knows how can code will do to transform the tech industry and what’s possible. We all knew that basic Python coding tasks would start to be replaced by AI, but we’re actually seeing that in practice now. No longer just autocomplete, we can vibe code a whole application.
One of the keynotes showed the presenter finding an old Bluetooth-enabled Furby in a closet and using an AI coding assistant to update an old open source software library so he could use it in 2025. The story here was that as a silly fun thing, he probably wouldn’t have ever had time to tinker with it, but now it’s easy. I’m not saying anything new here, and I do understand the difference between vibe coding a Furby and writing a production application, but in the near term it clearly will make some of the more mundane tasks easier to pass off to AI. I really would like one to automatically keep up on Node.js dependencies for me, it’s the most dreadfully tedious task.
All of this is to say that at the conferences I attended this year, I saw a real maturity turning point in the AIs-that-can-code realm. And GitHub is a big player here because of how integrated their code tooling already is in so many organizations, and throughout open source software communities.
Phew.
As for my second point, the talks not being the centerpiece. I’d say there’s still the spine of what holds the conference together, but there were fascinating experiences scattered throughout the event, both from vendors and from GitHub. The vendor booths was woven throughout all the buildings, and there was often a seamless transition between GitHub activities and vendors. One moment you’re designing your own Octocat sticker, and the next you’re getting a coffee while chatting at the IBM booth.
I enjoyed the building activities, our options were a GitHub light or a GitHub Copilot Lego model, and I went for the Lego. It was a nice little relaxing break from conference chaos.
The venue of Fort Mason was also lovely, and they had regular shuttles from downtown San Francisco which made the hurdle of transportation a more surmountable one. Both mornings I had an easy journey on BART to a shuttle that left from Embarcadero station. Once there, the gorgeous San Francisco weather we enjoyed offered the perfect backdrop. If I needed some air, I could walk down a pier and get a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge. They also cleverly placed a giant GitHub sign so that you could see beautiful Alcatraz Island through it.
They served good food and we had lots of places to sit and enjoy it. And after one tour through the main keynote building where I played a game to get a juice, I had no problem finding a shady spot to sit down and do a half hour of urgent work that I had to knock out.
The electronic badges were also a lot of fun. You had the option of getting one during registration, and they were little devices powered by an ARM SBC. As “hackable” badges you could play with them as-is, but also make some changes to the code included on them to do things like show your GitHub stats and they had a whole area with laptops that would allow you to do this (good thing, I can’t plug anything USB into my work laptop!). Once mounted on your device, they have a whole website of activities and other tools you can add to them. Cool. The scavenger hunt was also fun. I found they held a charge for about 10 hours, depending on use, so while I charged my overnight and took it off the charger at 7AM to head to the city, it barely made it to 5PM. I brought my digital badge home and it’s sitting here by my desk, maybe I’ll vibe code some new stuff for it, haha!
I’m certain that having such a fun and engaging space is all designed for encouraging brand loyalty. People have a great experience at these events in addition to learning things. I have always had mixed feelings about GitHub, and I still do, but some of the high points are definitely around usability, in spite of being built around Git, a tool that’s notoriously difficult to use! And usability includes feeling comfortable, which GitHub Universe did beautifully this year.