Developers use more than one kind of tool to build software. With the flexibility to integrate exactly the right tools for the job, your team can work productively, however you work best. And when software development is accessible, intelligent, and open, you can spend less time calibrating your tool chain and more time focusing on the work that matters most.

Today, we’re simplifying an important part of your workflow: Continuous Integration (CI). We’re excited to be partnering with Google to bring Google Cloud Build to GitHub. Cloud Build helps you create fast, consistent, reliable builds across all languages. With this new integration, you can easily set up CI through Cloud Build and automate builds and tests as part of your GitHub workflow.

“The release of Cloud Build on GitHub Marketplace is the first step in an exciting partnership. Bringing our fully-managed continuous integration to the GitHub platform will provide fast, frictionless, and convenient CI for any repository on GitHub. Google Cloud and GitHub share a vision for developer productivity and we look forward to continuing to build on this partnership.” — Melody Meckfessel, Vice President of Engineering at Google Cloud

Get smart recommendations

GitHub will detect Dockerfiles in the root of a repository and automatically suggest you use a CI tool like Cloud Build from GitHub Marketplace if one isn’t already set up. These smart recommendations will be rolling out to everyone in the coming months.

Reduce context switching

Cloud Build uses the new Checks API, a better way to get feedback from integrations on your code. Once a build is complete, you can see rich status reports, annotated code, and detailed information—all without leaving GitHub.

Learn more about the Google Cloud Build integration

From large businesses to open source projects, every team has their own approach to CI. We built GitHub to support yours. And we’ll keep working with our partners to create an open platform, where your team can use the tools they need to stay productive and do their best work on GitHub.

Interested in building on our platform? Contact the Marketplace team to learn more.

Greetings, San Francisco! Join us on August 7 for our Craftwork event. This workshop is open to developers of any skill level who want to learn how to use the GitHub API to build better developer workflows. We’ll have stickers for everyone, too! GitHubbers will walk attendees through the process of creating their first GitHub App. This workshop will cover:

• Introduction to the GitHub Apps flow
• Probot, a great tool for getting started building GitHub Apps
• Hosting code with Glitch

Beginners welcome

Craftwork is a hands-on workshop for learning how to build GitHub Apps—tools that can help make you and your team more productive with GitHub. The atmosphere is casual and informal; we’ll all be working together and helping each other out to build or first GitHub Apps. You will be able to work at your own pace with the help of a GitHubber nearby in case you run into any trouble.

You’ll leave with a working GitHub App, deployed and ready to use, and the confidence to continue building the tools you need to be more productive with your open source project, or at your work.

Details

For: Beginner and experienced developers alike who are looking to extend GitHub with apps When? August 7, 2018, 6-9pm PT Where? GitHub, 88 Colin P Kelly Jr Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

If you do not yet have a GitHub account, be sure create one before the event. It’s fast, easy, and free. Food and refreshments will be provided. If you have any dietary restrictions, please let us know during registration.

RSVP here

Earlier this year, we launched GitHub Learning Lab to help people of all skill levels use GitHub. Our initial course offerings included “Introduction to GitHub”, “Communicating using Markdown”, “Managing Merge Conflicts”, “GitHub Pages”, and “Moving Your Project to GitHub”. More than 3,700 students have successfully completed a Learning Lab course.

Now we’re releasing four new courses on Learning Lab for learners of all skill levels:

Uploading to GitHub and Migrating to GitHub

We broke out the existing “Moving to GitHub” course into two new courses: “Uploading to GitHub” and “Migrating to GitHub”. This lets you focus on bringing your projects to GitHub, no matter where they are.

Start Uploading to GitHub or Migrating to GitHub now

Community Starter Kit

GitHub loves the open source community, and we want your project to appeal to both veteran open source contributors and newcomers alike. In this course, you will learn what settings to use and files you should add to your repository to provide the information and features new contributors will need to be successful.

Access your Community Starter Kit

Introduction to HTML

Learning Lab is a great way to learn how to use GitHub more effectively, but why stop there? In our first non-GitHub focused course, join Learning Lab for an “Introduction to HTML”.

Build your first webpage with an Introduction to HTML

Now available in Marketplace

Learning Lab is now also available in GitHub Marketplace. In addition to Learning Lab, Marketplace houses integrations you can add to your repository. If you currently access Learning Lab from lab.github.com, your experience isn’t going to change—and thanks for the support!

Sign up for Learning Lab

As we shared in a recent blog post, the Editor Tools team at GitHub has been working on improving the user experience of our GitHub extension for Visual Studio.

Here’s what’s new in the latest GitHub for Visual Studio release (Version 2.5.4):

Pull request improvements

We are now using the new Octokit.NET library that uses the GraphQL API, which has improved the performance for listing pull requests. Lists that used to take minutes to load are now loading in a matter of seconds within our extension. Additionally, by using GraphQL for our pull request models, we will be able to use GitHub GraphQL APIs as they become available, keeping our extension up to date.

We’ve also improved our general pull request experience by fixing the UI on pull request changes when scrolling horizontally, removing leftover [remote…] entries that were left in the .git/config file when previewing a pull request to upstream, and preventing pull requests from opening in the browser multiple times.

@stanleygoldman, @grokys, and @donokuda have led the efforts for these improvements, and we’re also very grateful to @Neme12 for contributing to our project by updating the pull request changes view to use the built in Visual Studio icons.

Navigating between GitHub.com and Visual Studio

Something we’re particularly excited about exploring is how and why users navigate between GitHub.com and Visual Studio. We’ve started explore the functionality of what is possible with things like opening links that have been copied to the clipboard (Code context > GitHub > Open from clipboard) and copying links from Visual Studio to your clipboard (Code context > GitHub > Copy link to clipboard).

Thank you @jnm2 for opening up an issue that started this conversation and @jcansdale for recognizing this opportunity and taking lead to improve this user experience!

Get involved

As always, we are eager to hear from you in a number of ways. If you run into bugs or limitations in our functionality, open up an issue in our open source repository. Or if you want to contribute to our extension, review our README and Contributor Guidelines and join the fun!

If you’re interested in participating in some usability studies around our extension, we invite you to fill out a short survey.

Let us know on Twitter how you use the Open from clipboard feature! Follow us @GitHubVS for the latest on what we’re doing.

Welcome to the July edition of Game Bytes, a monthly series focused on the game developer community. This month, we take a look at the legacy of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in open source.

The NES was released 35 years ago today. While official NES games haven’t been released in over 20 years, a “homebrew” scene exists where developers are still creating NES games (playable on the original hardware or on emulators) in the original 6502 Assembly Language.

Whether you grew up playing NES games, or your parents did, you’re bound to find something of interest—either in the gameplay or in the code—for some of these games below.

Open source homebrew NES games

Super Tilt Bro

Super Tilt Bro is a game inspired by Super Smash Bros–a two-player fighting game where you must knock a friend (or the computer) off of a platform. The latest release introduces a new stage and mysterious orb that gives one player incredible strength.

Pwn Adventure Z

Pwn Adventure Z is a zombie survival game made to be hacked. It was originally released as a physical cartridge at CSAW (Cyber Security Awareness Week), the largest student-run cyber security event in the world, for the 2015 CTF (Capture the Flag) competition.

Nova the Squirrel

Nova the Squirrel is a platform game featuring a squirrel by the name of Nova Storm. Help her uncover new abilities and save the strange new world that she’s found herself in.

Thwaite

In Thwaite, you must protect a small town from destruction by taking out incoming missiles with fireworks. Defend it for seven nights to win the game.

Falling

Not much is known about why our hero is “Falling” from the sky, but they must collect as many coins as possible while avoiding all platforms. This was @tragicmuffin’s first time creating a game from scratch and working with Assembly.

Sprilo

Sprilo is a small, time-attack racing game. Test your ability to drive a tiny car around a track as fast as you can in over three unique courses. Created in less than 30 days for last year’s GitHub Game Off competition, this was @cbrwn’s first time creating a game using Assembly for any sort of console. It was created in less than 30 days for last year’s GitHub Game Off competition.

Interested in building your own NES game? This guide to 6502 Assembly from @skilldrick is an excellent place to start.

Little bits

SuperTux: help wanted

You might not know 6502 Assembly Language, but if you have some experience with C++ then the SuperTux team are looking for people to assist with continuing development of the classic platform game. Contribute to the core gameplay or contribute content through the integrated level editor.

Js13kgames starts next month

The seventh annual js13kgames–a JavaScript coding competition for HTML5 game developers–kicks off next month. If you don’t know 6502 Assembly Language or C++, but are comfortable around HTML/CSS/JS, @end3r’s month-long game jam to create a JavaScript game in less than 13 kilobytes might be for you!

See the website for more details.

New itch.io desktop app in beta

The latest version of the itch.io desktop app is in open beta. The Electron-based app is available for download on Windows, macOS, or Linux. You can use it to browse, download and stay up to date with the latest indie games on itch.io. Take it for a spin and be sure to report any bugs you find. Nice work @fasterthanlime!

Dear Weather Guy

Dear Weather Guy was created for the recent Godot Community Jam. Thanks to a nice little integration with the Open Weather Map API, you can have fun trying to guess the real temperature of world cities. It works on Windows, macOS and Linux. Beautiful work, Emilio and Andre Mari Coppola!

Join us in August for the next edition of Game Bytes!