At its Universe 2021 conference, GitHub promoted its new Issues experience to public beta, providing projects and dynamic tables, expanded Copilot support for Jetbrains and Java, added Ruby support for code scanning, and announced many more features.
Projects allow developers to filter, sort, and group issues and pull requests. Projects use a spreadsheet-like layout instead of the columns layout familiar to users of the old Kanban-like boards.
Project tables can be customized with custom fields and stored views to make it easier to plan and track development progress. Developers can create iteration fields to organize and sort issues by sprint and cycles. Issues can also be associated to actionable tasks, which makes it possible to track their status along with the rest of a project's issues. In addition to the table and board views, GitHub will be offering a timeline view in a next release.
After adopting Codespaces as the default development environment for the entire organization, GitHub has been working to expand its capabilities. This includes the possibility of using the command line and SSH to access their development environments through GitHub CLI, REST API support to manage Codespaces programmatically, simplified access to GitHub Container Registry thanks to automatic authentication, and more.
Codespaces provide a complete, ready-to-use, cloud-hosted development environment in a matter of minutes, supporting code completion, extensions, code navigation, and other advanced capabilities powered by Visual Studio Code.
Introduced along with Codespaces, GitHub Discussions have been also updated based on feedback from the community. Now Discussions can trigger Actions workflows and provide new ways to categorize and filter discussions with custom labels. In the next few months, GitHub says, Discussions will enable the creation of polls and dashboards to gather trends across issues, discussions, pull requests.
GitHub has also been working on bringing extended editor support to its AI-powered pair programmer introduced last Summer, Copilot. In particular, you can now use it from within Neovim and Jetbrains IDEs, including IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm. Copilot is definitely still in its infancy, and it faces many challenges of different nature, but GitHub has confirmed its commitment to bringing this technology forward by announcing support for additional programming languages coming in the next months.
As a final note concerning DevOps and security, it is worth mentioning the introduction of reusable workflows aimed to reduce duplication when using GitHub Actions, a new API to auto-scale self-hosted action runners, and CodeQL support for Ruby, available both in the CodeQL CLI and Visual Studio Code.
If you want to go deeper and learn more about GitHub new capabilities, you can watch Universe sessions on-demand.