I’ve quite a lengthy experience with GitHub workflows, but not up to the point where I can claim I’m an expert. However, I recently developed a new workflow, and it prompted me to write this post. Feel free to add your own. What are GitHub workflows? A workflow is a configurable automated process that will run one or more jobs.

I moved my blog from WordPress to GitLab Pages in…​ 2016. I’m happy with the solution. However, I used GitHub Pages when I was teaching for both the courses and the exercises, e.g., Java EE. At the time, there was no GitHub Actions: I used Travis CI to build and deploy. Recently, I had to use GitHub Pages to publish my Apache APISIX workshop. Travis is no longer free. GitHub Actions are a thing. I used the now nominal path and faced a few hurdles; here are my findings.

Recently, I designed a simple metrics-tracking system. A Python script queries different providers' APIs for metrics, e.g., Twitter, GitHub, etc. The idea is to run this script each day, store them in Google BigQuery and provide an excellent data visualization in Google Data Studio. I’m a big fan of automation, so I’m using GitHub Actions. Accessing Google Cloud with a Service Account I query the different APIs with different Python libraries.

Whether you like it or not, GitHub has become the primary provider to host one’s code. You or your company is probably using GitHub. I want to highlight some files to beautify your GitHub repository in this post. README I hope that by now, everybody is familiar with READMES. If one places a README file at the root of one’s repo, GitHub will display its content on the repo’s homepage. However, here are a couple of tips you may not know.

For once, I’m wondering a bit if this post can be helpful to somebody else. I believe my context is pretty specific. Anyway, just in case it might be the case, here it is. My Jet Train project makes use of GTFS. GTFS stands for General Transit Feed Specification. It models public transportation schedules and their associated geographic information. GTFS is based on two kinds of data, static data, and dynamic data. Static data may change but do so rarely, e.g.

Recently, GitHub allowed users to customize the appearance of their profile page. This is different from GitHub Pages: it allows to add extra content to one’s GitHub profile. Since that feature is available, a lot of developers have decided to customize their page. I think this is fun, so I also wanted to do the same, in my own way. I wanted to describe it, so fellow developers can take inspiration. Since the whole process is a bit long, I’ve split this post in two parts.

Before the quarantine, one of my former students asked me an interesting question: does GitHub sens an email to the owner of a repository, if an issue is opened on this repo? The answer is not important. As a former consultant, I tried to understand the root question. After digging a bit, I understood it: the student was using a project he found on GitHub. That project was lacking a feature, and the issue was to request it.

Since its inception, the attitude of GitHub toward repositories was to allow unlimited public repositories, while make private ones paying. Whether it’s a consequence of Microsoft’s acquisition or not, this stance changed recently: GitHub announced private repositories were also made free, for up to 3 contributors. There was a lot of celebration on the Web, but not from my side. This move looks more like a (desperate?) move to keep developers on GitHub.

As a consultant, I’ve done a lot of Java projects in different 'enterprise' environments. In general, the Continuous Integration stack - when there’s one, is comprised of: Github Enterprise or Atlassian Stash for source version control, Jenkins as the Continuous Integration server, sometimes but rarely Atlassian Bamboo, Maven for the build tool, JaCoCo for code coverage, or even Artifactory as the artifacts repository - once I had Nexus.

When one thinks about hosting one’s Git repository online, one’s first choice is just Github, no questions asked. It’s so successful that it has become the de facto standard of Git solutions in the cloud. It’s so well-entrenched that developers are advised to use it as their portfolio. At first glance, Github has it all: public repositories, group collaboration, metrics, page hosting, on-premise install option, etc.