Microsoft-owned GitHub is announcing some major new features today at its Satellite 2020 event today. GitHub is getting two major new features: GitHub Discussions, and GitHub Codespaces.

First, let’s talk about GitHub Codespaces: its a new paid feature that will allow users to instantly start coding on GitHub without needing to set up their own development environment or IDE. Pricing for GitHub Codespaces is yet to be finalised, but you can sign-up for early access today. 

GitHub Codespaces gives users access to a browser-based version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor. The editor supports code competition, extensions, terminal access, and more. Developers will also be able to start a codespace in GitHub and code from their desktop IDE, instead of using the online editor. GitHub Codespaces is likely powered by Microsoft’s Visual Studio Codespaces feature under the hood, which was previously known as Visual Studio Online.

And there’s the new GitHub Discussions feature. The new experience is essentially a place for users to discuss different aspects of a project, like discussing new feature ideas. But more importantly, users can answer questions and help each other out, which I think is the important part of GitHub Discussions. The company is essentially building a Stack Overflow-like experience right into GitHub with the new Discussions feature. And better yet: your discussions contributions will appear in your profile’s contribution graphs, too.

GitHub says its testing the new Discussions feature with a few open source communities, and you can check one out here. 

GitHub is also getting some new security features — code scanning, which checks for potential security vulnerabilities in your code, is now available for free for all public projects. Secret scanning, which checks for secret API keys in code, is also now available for all private repositories.

Tagged with Github Codespaces, GitHub Discussions