GitHub Universe 2022 Opens Up Developer Tooling

GitHub hosted its Universe 2022 event Nov. 9-10, announcing a series of new tools and capabilities for developers.

Among the new capabilities announced at GitHub Universe was a preview of new voice functionality for the GitHub Copilot service that provides artificial intelligence (AI) to help developers write code.

In addition, new project roadmap tracking capabilities are being added to GitHub projects, and the GitHub Actions continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) service is getting a new migration feature to help users move from other CI/CD platforms to GitHub.

Related: What Is GitHub and What Is It Used For?

And for organizations that need or want to run their own private code repositories with full control, GitHub Enterprise 3.7 was released with numerous usability improvements.

GitHub also used the venue to release its latest Octoverse report, which provides trends and insight into the current state of DevOps.

"Ten years ago, for the very first time we published the Octoverse and reported just 2.8 million developers on GitHub," GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke (pictured) said during his GitHub Universe 2022 keynote. "I'm more than thrilled that, as of today, 94 million developers call us their home."

Developer Insights from GitHub Octoverse 2022 Report

Among the high-level findings in the Octoverse 2022 report is that more than 90% of companies today are using open source software in some capacity. Across publicly accessible open source projects, there have been 3.5 billion contributions in 2022 — a 20% increase over 2021.

Related: GitHub vs. GitLab: Which One Is Better for Your Enterprise?

The overall usage of GitHub is growing too. In 2022, 85.7 million new code repositories have been added to GitHub, representing 20% year-over-year growth. Across those repositories, the GitHub Actions CI/CD system for automation is increasingly being used, with 263 million automated jobs run in 2022.

In terms of programming languages used by developers on GitHub, the top three languages — JavaScript, Python, and Java — remain unchanged from 2021. Of note though, the report identified HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language), which is used to define Terraform infrastructure-as-code (IaC) policies, as the fastest growing language on GitHub.

Coming Soon: GitHub Copilot for Business, Hey GitHub, Roadmap View for Projects

During the GitHub Universe 2022opening keynote, Rizel Scarlett, developer advocate at GitHub, announced a series of innovations coming to the Copilot AI pair programming service.

An increasingly popular service, GitHub Copilot uses AI to help developers write code. While Copilot is largely focused on individual developers, that will change soon, with a business version of GitHub Copilot coming in December, Scarlett announced.

GitHub Copilot for Business will enable organizations to manage teams of developers using the service with centralized policies and configurations, she said.

Right now, the only way to interface with Copilot is via text. However, a Hey GitHub! voice service is in development.

GitHub is also looking to make it easier for teams to gain better visibility into project management. Roadmap View, which is now in private beta, will provide an integrated way for teams to understand what is being worked on and what's coming next, according to Allison Weins, senior product manager at GitHub.

GitHub-Roadmap-View

Also announced GitHub Universe 2022was GitHub Enterprise Server 3.7, which Maya Ross, senior director Enterprise at GitHub, said will include more than 70 new features. Ross summarized the major new features by saying they help enable reusable workflows as well as collaboration across enterprise teams.

Security also gets a key boost with a new security overview dashboard that provides a unified view of code security across an enterprise.

"Building, running, and maintaining all the software for the world has never been more complex," Dohmke said. "As the home of all developers, we have made it our mission to build this one integrated platform where developers can do it all."