Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
GitHub this week made available an update to its command-line interface (CLI) that enables DevOps teams to add extensions to workflows.
Billy Griffin, director of engineering for GitHub, said the company’s initial focus was providing DevOps teams with a set of workflows that could be invoked easily via a CLI. Now GitHub is encouraging developers to extend those workflows using version 2.0 of its CLI that hopefully will be shared with the larger community, he added.
For example, extensions have already been created that order branches by how recently they were created and then display all associated pull requests.
At the other end of the spectrum, developers are creating simple screensaver extensions for their own amusement.
The level of interest in extensions varies widely across DevOps teams. Many of them simply want to employ an opinionated workflow that has been created on their behalf. Other DevOps teams want to be able to make modest modifications. Others prefer to customize workflows as much as possible to fit their specific purposes. Version 2.0 of the CLI provided by GitHub enables each DevOps team to decide how much to modify their workflows. However, as a DevOps team gains more experience, increasingly they tend to want to customize workflows.
The number of workflows being created around the GitHub repository continues to increase steadily as more organizations embrace best GitOps practices. GitHub is the most widely employed repository for managing software artifacts, and the level of sophistication of workflows built using either scripts or GitHub actions is increasing steadily. Much of that effort is focused on streamlining processes that otherwise would get in the way of enabling developers to spend more time writing code.
Of course, the pressure on developers to write more code faster has never been greater. As organizations embrace digital business transformation, they are discovering how dependent they are on software to create customer experiences that drive revenue. The challenge comes at a time when many developers are working from home to help combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and many existing workflows need to be re-engineered. At the same time, development teams are becoming more distributed as organizations become more comfortable with hiring developers anywhere in the world.
It’s not clear to what degree the changing application development landscape might drive organizations to re-evaluate what platforms they are employing to drive DevOps processes. Many on-premises development platforms have been replaced by cloud-based alternatives in the past year. However, because necessity is the mother of invention, the workflows relied on prior to the pandemic are not only now forever changed, but they will also likely be altered again as development teams work more intermittently in-office and from home once the pandemic subsides.
Regardless of how those workflows evolve, the single-valued DevOps attribute is going to be flexibility. The challenge now is determining which platform does the most to enable that flexibility at a time when uncertainty continues to prevail.
