Today, we're rolling out a new feature that makes Pull Requests easier to create:

After pushing a branch to GitHub, you (and only you) will see that branch at the top of your repo's page, along with buttons to create a Pull Request for it or compare it with master.

At GitHub, we're constantly creating and using Pull Requests. They're an indispensable tool in our internal workflow, and a key part of making open source project management with GitHub so great. We're excited to make using them easier!

Today Jake Douglas joins us as a GitHubber. Jake is going to be helping us squeeze as much performance as we can out of our backend systems. We're really excited to have him and we can't wait to see what he comes up with.

You might recognize him from his contributions to rubinius and EventMachine. You can follow him on twitter and GitHub.

Today we pushed a redesigned feature that highlights language statistics on repository home pages, allowing you to quickly see what languages a repository contains. It's a great way to get a general picture of a repository before you dive into the code.

We're using linguist to collect language statistics from repositories. Linguist is aware of common files and directories, so code like jquery or directories labeled vendor won't be included in the final count. If you happen to spot a language that linguist doesn't recognize, let us know!

Today we pushed a redesigned settings page that will make it easier to find and edit settings for your personal account as well as any organizations you own.

The major change is having easy access to settings for your organization. In the previous design you had to fax us your social security number, drivers license photo, and send us a hard copy of your Passport before you could find the link.

Now it's right there with the rest of your settings.

For GitHub Enterprise customers this will be in the next regular release of GitHub Enterprise.

It hasn't exactly been a good week for GitHub's nines. Just under an hour of total downtime over the past week comes to 99.46% uptime - far below our standards.

As you can imagine, it's been a frustrating week for us too. We've been fighting a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack since Saturday. The quality of the GitHub experience has been impacted by this DDoS and I wanted to take a second to apologize for that and tell you what we're doing to fix it.

This attack is global, and has been very intense at times. Yesterday morning, for example, github.com suddenly received requests from 10,000 times the number of clients it had handled the minute before.

Our Ops team is working around the clock together with our hosting and network providers to deflect the impact of this attack while keeping GitHub fast and available for you, our awesome GitHub users. For the times we've been unable to stop the attack from taking us down, we sincerely do apologize.

We're better protected against DDoS attacks now than we've ever been before and plan to make next week a better week.

Sit back, close your eyes, and think about how good you are at coding. Man, you're awesome. When did you learn how to be so awesome? Now just think how awesome you would be if you had learned how to code when you were seven years old.

Here at GitHub, we think it's important to contribute to our future. Since kids will eventually grow up (so we hear) we think it'd be awesome to teach them how to code. We're working with CoderDojo to bring their awesome kid-code-teaching classes to the US.

CoderDojo has been spreading across Ireland teaching kids ages 7–18 topics like HTML, CSS, Javascript, iOS app development, and pretty much anything else they think sounds awesome. Now CoderDojo is coming to the US, starting with San Francisco. The sessions are free and laptops can be provided if kids aren't able to bring their own. Each class is taught by a professional in the given topic. To help create the best environment for kids to ask questions, there is a mentor for every three kids in a session. For all this awesome learning potential there is only one requirement: "Above all, be cool."

GitHub is really excited to get involved. We'll be hosting the first US dojo at our San Francisco office. If you have kids that you think would be interested in learning HTML, CSS, and a little GameMaker, sign them up! Spots are limited, and are expected to fill up fast.

Time: 12pm – 2pm, February 25th
Place: GitHub HQ, 548 4th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
Sign Up: http://coderdojo.com/dojos/san-francisco/

More Info
@coderdojosf
Website
Google Group

For more info, you can check out the CoderDojo site or watch my talk about CoderDojo.

Dear Mom,

Things are going great here in SF. I'm collaborating everyday. I miss you and the family. But don't worry, I'm going out with friends this Thursday night!

XOXO,

Your little coder

The Facts:

GitHub and Heroku have decided to join forces to bring you a drink up in Sydney this Wednesday (8th of February), so come on down to the King St Brewhouse and have a beer with us!

Welcome to the The GitHub Reflog — the semi-regular chronicle of remarkable GitHub repos and community activity, brought to you by Kenneth Reitz. For previous editions, check out The Reflog Archive.

This week, we'd like to extend a warm welcome to Goldman Sachs, ID Software, Google, NASA, and Netflix to the GitHub community! It's been an eventful week.

We're also pleased to announce that GitHub now supports the emoji. You're welcome.

Featured Repo of the Week

visionmedia/uikit

UIKit is a small collection of flexible and cohesive components for the modern web. It strives to be as decoupled and elegant as possible. With an emphasis on (mostly) structure-only styling, UIKit makes it simple to apply application specific styling without cluttering your frontend codebase.

Checkout the project page to see it in action.

Awesome Repo of the Week

joho/7XX-rfc

This satiric project is an RFC proposal that contains a new series of HTTP status codes covering developer mistakes.

Some notable additions in this faux RFC include:

We've all been there.

Remarkable Repos

For more open source news, check out The Changelog and github/explore.

Mother nature's blast of snow hampered the first attempt at this in January. A re-placement of the event to April 9th should help to mitigate the weather risks.

The Event

If you are in Chicago, have a free evening April 9th, are interested in Git and are familiar with SVN, this free event, sponsored by ThoughtWorks Chicago and GitHub Training is just what you've been waiting for. Come listen to Matthew's thoughts about moving from SVN to Git on GitHub and ask your hardest questions.

Join Us

Almost four years and hundreds of drinkups and conferences later, GitHub was sorely missing in action from one entire continent: Africa.

So, let's fix that.

(Photo credit: capetowndailyphoto.com)

I'm here in Cape Town, South Africa with @atmos for my talk at Scaleconf later this week. Today, Wednesday, January 25, we'll be hanging at Wakame for pre-conference drinks from 7pm to 11pm. You don't need to be a Scaleconf attendee to join us for drinks! Here's a map to Wakame.

Drop in and steal an octocat sticker from us- we'd love to meet you!

If you're in the Atlanta area this Thursday January 26th, come join us at Fadó at 8:30pm and have a pint or a dram on GitHub.

We are hosting the SpreeConf After Party. Come mingle with us and the Spree Team. If you don't have your ticket yet, use the promo code 'GITHUB' to receive a $40 discount.

For those of you not attending the conference, don't worry. The After Party is also a GitHub Drinkup. Partying is free, but space is limited. Please let us know if you'll be attending.

Today is Russell Belfer's second day as a GitHubber. He has been hacking away on libgit2 and joins us to do more of that and other things as well.

Mostly recently, Russell has been building web applications for a cloud telephony provider, but prior to that he's worked on interactive graphics, data analysis, and a variety of other things.

An interesting fact about Russell is that he got to hire both myself and Nick at a prior startup and we're all excited to be working together again.

Russell's daughter is most excited that her dad gets to work with Octocat in an office full of dogs.

You can read his code or follow him on twitter.

Today marks Danny Greg's first day as a GitHubber. He'll be helping us rock GitHub for Mac to the max, as well as help us out on various other projects around the Hub. Previous to GitHub, Danny worked on some of our favorite software at Realmac and No Thirst, like Little Snapper, Courier, and MoneyWell.

Check out his tweets or some of his code. Welcome, Danny!