GitHub was created as a place for developers to work together on code. After almost a decade founded, it has become the epicenter of social coding, and one of the most visited place for coders and developer around the world.
To help them with their project, GitHub announced two new discoverability features that aims to ease developers in finding interesting new projects. According to GitHub, this is "the first step toward using the world's largest collection of open source data to improve the way we collaborate with these new experiences."
First up is Github dashboard that shows a "Discover Repositories" feed.
This feature highlights projects based on the users' interests. So, if a user is interested in Python projects for example, and follow Python contributors, GitHub will show the user some relevant projects written in that programming language.
These recommendations are tailored to the user based on people they follow, repositories they star, and what's popular on GitHub.
Discover Repositories can also highlight popular projects on the platform which, although not necessarily related to the user's area of expertise, are probably interesting.
There is the Explore tab that shows hand-picked collections of projects grouped by particular concepts, paradigms, and languages. So if a user just started learning AI, GitHub can show the user some relevant and curated collection of machine learning projects.
The topic pages allow users to search for all projects centered around a particular technology. This means that if the user wants to find every Android project on the platform, the user can easily do that using this feature.
More Robust Security Features
With millions of open source projects on GitHub. If you build software, your code will likely depends on at least one of those projects. GitHub is updating its security feature to help users manage the increasingly complex dependencies.
This is allow users to code safer while they continue their work on connected projects or even for private repositories.
There is a dependency graph which shows insight into projects that users depend on. They can see all of the packages and applications that they're connected to, without having to leave their repository.
The graph initially supports just Ruby and JavaScript.
GitHub plans to add security alerts to the dependency graph to help users track dependencies that are associated with public security vulnerabilities. This way, GitHub can notify users who have access when it detects a vulnerability.
And in some cases where possible, GitHub can will advise developers on appropriate steps to take in order to resolve the issue, such as suggesting known security fix from the GitHub community.
"Security alerts are the first in what we hope will be a robust collection of tools to keep your code safe," said GitHub on its blog. "And we need people who build on our APIs to help us make them even better -
and to keep security data current for the community."