Open Source Friday with Octokit - GitHub's SDKs for JS, Ruby, .NET and more!

GitHub SDK

• The GitHub SDK simplifies interaction with the GitHub API by providing helpers, tooling, and standardization, reducing the need for repetitive coding.
• It abstracts away authentication, throttling, caching, and other protocol-based tasks, allowing developers to focus on their business problems.
• The GitHub SDK team maintains and improves the SDK, ensuring its value to developers.

Octokit SDKs

• The Octokit SDKs have experienced significant growth and adoption, with over 115 million package downloads per week, 2,300 open-source community contributors, and 4.5 million aspects of software depending on them.
• The Octokit organization, consisting of only two people, manages over 70 repositories and receives a tremendous volume of GitHub notifications, requiring a first responder rotation and a review process to keep up with the influx.
• To address the challenge of keeping up with the coverage of the GitHub API and to support additional languages like Python and Java, two generative SDKs are being introduced.

GitHub API

• The GitHub API was first introduced in March 2008 and has been continuously developed and improved since then.
• The Zen of GitHub is a collection of 12 Zen principles accessible via the API endpoint api.github.com/zen.

Contributing to GitHub SDKs

• Contributors are welcome to contribute to the SDKs.
• The best way to get started contributing to Octokit is by looking for "up for grabs" issues in the repository.
• Python is on the roadmap for future development of the GitHub SDKs, but there is no timeline for its release.

Future of GitHub SDKs

• The future of GitHub SDKs involves using generative AI to automate mundane tasks and provide users with more advanced features and integrations.
• The SDKs aim to be language-agnostic and provide no-code options to make them accessible to a wider range of users, including non-engineers.
• The team is currently focused on leveling the features across all SDKs before considering how to tailor them to the specific needs of different programming communities.
• Language abstraction is a key focus for the team, allowing features designed for one SDK to be easily ported to others.

GitHub Terraform Provider

• The GitHub Terraform provider is a lesser-known but widely used tool for managing GitHub infrastructure as code, especially among large enterprises.