GitHub Toggle Chrome Extension – Quickly toggle between a GitHub Repo and its GitHub Pages by the click of a button.

Last week Christian Heilmann (codepo8) released a handy bookmarklet that lets on switch between the GitHub Pages URL of a repo hosted on GitHub and the repo contents itself. This afternoon I took the liberty of transforming it into a Chrome Extension, mainly as an exercise to myself. The extension adds a small button which …

Recreating the GitHub Contribution Graph with CSS Grid Layout

Recently, I decided to try to recreate the GitHub Contribution graph using CSS Grid Layout, and found it was an interesting challenge. As I always find while working with CSS Grid Layout, I end up with far less CSS than I would have using almost any other method. In this case, the layout-related part of …

Improve the GitHub Website with “Refined GitHub”

Refined GitHub is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox “that simplifies the GitHub interface and adds useful features”. The nice list of additions includes URL Condensing (pictured above) and Markdown preservation when copying comments (pictured below). The extension is also able to add a few extra views, filters, and links (such as linking to …

Context aware MySQL pools via HAProxy

At GitHub they use MySQL as their main datastore. The setup is a typical “single-writer-multiple-readers” design. They loadbalance between server pools using HAProxy, with some cleverness built in: Instead [of checking whether a MySQL server is live with mysql-check], we make our HAProxy pools context aware. We let the backend MySQL hosts make an informed …

Using <details> in GitHub

Turns out you an use the <details> element in GitHub: <details> <summary>Summary Goes Here</summary> …this is hidden, collapsable content… </details> Handy if you have a rather big stack trace that might make your comment a tad too cluttered: Going into the rabbit hole it looks like support for this tag was initially requested back in …

Deployment at Github

All deployments happen in chat via Hubot commands, which ensures that everyone in the company (from development to operations to support) has visibility into changes that are being pushed into production. Deploying branches to GitHub.com → Reminds me of how deployments at Etsy happen. They’ve got Deployinator integrated into IRC and deploy using deployment trains. …

The $2375 Amazon AWS mistake

When I got to GitHub, I checked my application.yml, and it was online with my [Amazon S3] API keys… Crap! I reverted the last few commits, and deleted all traces from GitHub. I was able to clean it up within about 5 minutes and no one else knew about the repo. After a close call, …

GitHub’s CSS

I’m always interested in the development details of other products, particularly their styleguides and approach to CSS. Given my penchant for the otherwise inane CSS details, I decided to write a bit about GitHub’s CSS. Always great to see how a company organises its code. It’s an honest piece, also covering stuff that should improve. …