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Grace Gong
Grace Gong

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My GitHub Universe 2023 Experience with GitHub Campus Experts & GitHub Education

Attending GitHub Universe 2023 was amazing!

Whats GitHub Universe?
GitHub Universe brings together the world's developers, enterprise leaders, and security professionals for two days of interactive sessions on AI, security, and the developer experience. Come for the learning, stay for the fun. We'll see you there!
How Did you get the opportunity to attend?
As a GitHub Campus Expert, this year I had the opportunity to attend GitHub Universe in person and the sessions and discussions I had there were impactful, inspiring, and a great testament to the incredible work and progress the Github Community has put together to improve the developer experience this past year.

How was the experience?
As my friend Harsh from OurTechCommunity (OTC) said - All the Campus Experts were so inspiring! It was so good to talk about each other's hardships openly, hear about their efforts and goals, see their drive and hard work, and learn from their experiences and knowledge.
We were also able to learn from the overall tech community from Universe, whether it be about Open Source, or what other companies are doing to adopt and adapt to the current evolving tech landscape. I am so grateful for GitHub, the GitHub Education Team, and everyone who worked to make this possible. Big Thank you to Luis, Juan, Dyson, Stormy Peters and everyone else who worked to make us, as students feel heard, and give us spaces to learn and bring our learnings to our overall communities.

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What activities did you attend?

  • GitHub Open Source Pre-event Networking @ Minna Art Gallery
  • GitHub Platform Engineering Talk @ MoMa
  • Telus GitHub Actions Talk @ MoMa
  • Developer Experience @ Discussion Lounge
  • VSCode Productivity @ Discussion Lounge
  • Observability Solutions @ Discussion Lounge
  • Education Panel @ Hyatt
  • Ignacio's Panel on AI In Education
  • Keynotes, Chat with Stormy + Martin
  • Booths: Microsoft, Datadog, Postman, Arm, GitHub CoPilot, Security,
  • Demos: GitHub Security, CoPilot
  • GitHub Certification
  • GitHub Women in Tech Event

What did you learn from attending GitHub Universe?
I learned additional ways to support and engage my community and how to uplift marginalized/underrepresented communities. Specifically, through the panels on specific GitHub Actions and Features that I can now talk about in the workshops and at my internship companies who use GHE, specific actions I can take to expand and make my community more consistently engaged.
Through conversations with those in open source (leading communities or as an active contributor), I was able to learn about current open source projects, how to get involved, and how OSPO's work(An open source program office (OSPO) serves as the center of competency for an organization's open source operations and structure.) I was able to learn about the operational / logistics side of these groups and how to keep these communities alive and engaged. The key themes continued to tie back to Developer Experience and how understanding the Developer + being able to take steps to make it easy for developers to know how and when to contribute is often key to success in maintaining or making it accessible for the community.
The GitHub Women in Tech event enabled me to learn how to support and uplift other marginalized genders, create safe spaces for discussion, and continue to be involved and immersed in my community. This conference was life-changing because it enabled me to be connected with inspiring women at GitHub + Beyond and from various walks of life. I learned from women of diverse backgrounds and their experiences/strategies in the workforce. I also learned about the struggles they faced in the process and some things I need to look out for / consider in my career.

Who did you meet?
Story Peters, Martin Woodward, Michael Hanley, Joseph K, Ingrid Yan @github Security, VPs of Product, PM @ GitHub Sponsors, Anjuan from GitHub Sponsors, Thomas Dohmke, GitHub Education Team, Datadog Employees (PM, PMM, Sales), Open Source Contributors (CS50, Huan Li, Employees from Slack that work on Electron, etc) David Malan, Demetris Cheatham,(Chief of Staff, GitHub) and of course, the Campus Experts! Workshop Speaker-> Telus, Tech lead from Platform Engineering Talk (Leslie @ny Times)
-The Women in Tech workshop had various women from students my age (I wasn't able to get her name but she is a masters at UWashington doing a PhD to senior / VP positions) and a Bootcamp grad from 2016 who is now a tech lead at HubSpot, IBM VP, A Digital Assets and Workplace Activation Lead at Aristocrat, GitHub Business Ops Staff, Robinhood Developer Advocate

Best thing about the event?
The opportunity to learn from others in the field from diverse backgrounds (technical + nontechnical) and hear their experiences working with their communities and achieving positive impacts.
Learning from the developers and community leaders about their projects, their contributors, their ideas for the future, and what is happening with emerging technologies
The GitHub Women in Tech Event, where I had the opportunity to meet inspiring women and their career journeys
Developing my interpersonal and technical skills through valuable workshops and in-person demos. I was even able to have my code reviewed at the Microsoft booth because at my internship, I was using an SDK they had released as Open Source. I learned from the Dev Advocates on best code practices and made advancements in my code's bugs
The Dev Advocates + other employees also gave me valuable advice and motivation by sharing their experiences and career journeys. This conference and talking to others enabled me to see that these and other issues, whether systemic or

All of GitHub Universe keynotes, announcements, and most popular sessions
You can now watch 40+ on-demand sessions from GitHub Universe!
https://reg.githubuniverse.com/flow/github/universe23/sessioncatalog/page/sessioncatalog?search.deliveryformat=1692799009854004CQlx

The highlights

  • GitHub Copilot Enterprise: a new subscription tier that culminates the entirety of our Copilot offerings and personalizes them with the context of your organization's codebases, available in February 2024.
  • GitHub Copilot Chat, an AI companion that'll allow you to write and understand code using whatever language you speak, will be generally available in December 2023 at no additional cost. We're also integrating Copilot Chat directly into github.com and mobile, so developers can code from anywhere.
  • Now available in preview: Code scanning autofix and secret scanning for generic secrets provide new capabilities to help you prevent and detect more security vulnerabilities across your organization.

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