Most people don’t realize that the humble pull request orchestrates surprisingly complex activities behind the scene. GitHub creates test merges and simulated merge branches to test and validate what would happen if the changes were merged into the target branch. This is more complex than most people realize, and it leads to a number of different SHAs being provided to the GitHub workflow. It’s time to understand these SHAs, their purpose, and how to find them.

Monorepos are often seen as the simple solution to complex collaboration and code management problems. Companies like Google and Facebook frequently mention their use of the pattern for their most important codebases, so clearly they have found ways to make these solutions scale to support large teams. What is their secret to being able to successfully use a monorepo, and how do they make it work where so many others fail? More importantly, should you be considering the approach?

GitHub supports defining a repository as a template. This enables you to configure a repository, its contents, and its branches quickly. But it can do more…

GitHub Actions Workflows can provide a great abstraction layer for creating or orchestrating build and release processes. Since we’re running code – in some cases, from third-parties – it’s important to understand how to secure the environment from malicious Actions. This is where permissions can help.

The support for custom features in Dev Containers is a huge improvement to the process of customizing images quickly and easily. The convenience and simplicity can have a cost – performance. Trying to customize a container using a feature recently, I struggled with an incredibly long build time. This is how I improved the process.

GitHub Actions allows you to create matrix builds to execute steps multiple times with different parameters. Fun tip – those parameters can be dynamic. You can define them programmatically!

Java makes it surprisingly easy to manage and package complex projects using Apache Maven. One question I’m frequently asked – how does this integrate with GitHub Actions? Turns out that the answer is “surprisingly well!”

Last week, we examined common myths about time. Software also has hero myths, which harm developers and limit productivity in astounding ways.

Time is a precious resource. Did you know it’s also the source of common myths among managers? And those myths can drain productivity (and happiness) from teams…

If you can code it, someone will find a way to exploit it ( accidentally or intentionally). Anytime development efforts are involved, it’s important to minimize security risks and bugs. This is also true with GitHub Actions, which allows you to script advanced automation solutions. Because of this, it’s important to understand where injection can occur and how to avoid it.