GitHub ReadME Project

A lot of what Derek Riemer needed to know to become a professional software developer, he learned during his years involved with the NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) project, an open source screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Like most of those involved with NVDA and its development, Riemer is blind. He found NVDA in 2011, while still in high school, when he was looking for a free alternative to his proprietary screen reader.

For Della Calder, none of the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) apps she tried seemed to resonate. She’d been in speech therapy for a few years and had used a few different apps and devices, but nothing stuck—not to mention that each came with a hefty price tag. That’s why her brother, Archer, decided to build an open source app that could be tailored to Della’s needs and preferences.

Have you ever wished you could query your code the same way you query a SQL database? Well, that’s exactly what GitHub’s CodeQL enables you to do. It’s a semantic code analysis engine that transforms your code into a structured database that you can use to surface security vulnerabilities or discover new insights. You don’t need to learn a thing about static analysis or structured queries to benefit from CodeQL.

Today’s ever-evolving world requires businesses to continually build and innovate at an unprecedented pace to deliver unceasing value to their customers. To succeed at this undertaking, leaders must enable agility across their team’s technical capabilities. The foundation for this kind of agility, across any size organization, begins with a culture built on continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and a passion for innovation.

“When I began with IBM in 1985, I came to realize that technology has the power to change and improve our quality of life, particularly those people who are marginalized by society,” says Dr. Chieko Asakawa, an IBM Fellow and chief executive director of the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan). “I realized we—meaning scientists, researchers, engineers, and the like—could make the impossible possible.

One of my strongest childhood memories is of the attic of my old house, where my family stored old scientific books. I would climb out onto the roof to read them. For my ninth birthday, I asked for a set of encyclopedias about math, physics, chemistry, and biology. I was always curious, always seeking answers. Much of my curiosity stemmed from realizing early in life that I was different from others.

Fathom Analytics CTO Jack Ellis decided to completely rewrite the company's codebase in 2019. Previously it was written in Go. Now it's written in PHP. That might be surprising given that Go is an increasingly popular language—part of a vanguard of relatively new programming languages like Rust, Swift, and Kotlin that have seen tremendous growth in recent years.

When developers think about accessibility, giant spreadsheets of errors from automated testing tools often come to mind. While these barriers correlate with specific pages or issues, they can feel divorced from the code that the developers are working on. So often, the discussion around how to address these errors boils down to how to conform with legislation like Section 508 in the U.S., or the Web Accessibility Directive in Europe, and nothing more.

In this video, I'll share how my team at Philips scaled our GitHub self-hosted runners in the cloud to enable CI/CD for the enterprise (similar to how GitHub-hosted runners are available for open source projects). We chose GitHub as our standard tool for software development due to its versatility and support for innersource collaboration. However, to support different operating systems and architectures, and connect to our internal network, we needed self-hosted runners.

The FullScreenMario project burned brightly for a few short weeks in October 2013 after Boing Boing lauded it as “a pretty impressive example of what HTML5, in-browser functionality can do.” A few days later, it went viral on Reddit and by November, attention turned to scrutiny, and Nintendo took the project down with a DMCA request. Josh Goldberg speaks of his former project with a bit of pride—it had level-editing long before Super Mario Maker, after all.