Workflow secrets from a decade on GitHub
GitHub is full of shortcuts, hacks, and hidden features that can make daily work smoother—whether you're a solo developer or leading a team. Vitor Monteiro, a Strategic Architect at GitHub with 10 years of hands-on experience (including time as an Engineering Lead), has collected the tips he relies on most. Here's what he says he can't live without.
Table-magic for Markdown tables
Building complex tables in Markdown by hand is tedious. Table-magic, an open source tool by GitHubber @stevecat, converts between CSV, TSV, Markdown, SQL, and HTML formats. Monteiro composes tables in the built-in form and copies the Markdown output, or uses it when someone sends him a CSV that needs to become an issue-friendly Markdown table.
Search the codebase for the copy you want to change
Because all of his company's websites live in GitHub repositories, Monteiro fixes visible bugs by searching for the exact sentence in quotes. That query jumps straight to the line in the file. Even in an organization of a hundred thousand employees, he says, a website bug should take about two minutes to locate in the right repository—and then it's just a pull request away.
Whether it's tabs versus spaces or "on prem" versus "on-premises," submit the patch and keep your contributions graph green.
Turn notifications into your primary inbox
Monteiro starts each morning at GitHub's participating notifications page, not email. When communication is transparent and internal, he argues, notifications serve as a more effective inbox than email—which lacks transparency and collaboration. He says he couldn't work at a company that relies on email as its main communication channel.
Three Chrome extensions for GitHub workflows
Monteiro has built three Chrome extensions to extend GitHub for his own use:
- Markwrap: Turns selected text into a Markdown link using whatever is on your clipboard. Simple, but a timesaver for anyone living in issues and pull requests.
- GitHub Red Alert: Turns the bell icon red in the background when there's at least one unread notification from an issue or pull request you're participating in.
- GitHub Open All Notifications: Adds a button to the notifications tab that opens every participating notification in a new tab—Monteiro's method for clearing his queue.
GitHub Projects as a personal todo list
Monteiro tracks all his work—current and past—on a project board with priority columns, including markers for when work was completed or abandoned. The todo list feature, paired with notifications, is central to how he prioritizes.
Use semantic navigation to size up a review
The semantic jump-to-methods feature is mostly known for navigation, but Monteiro also uses it as a review gauge. Opening the Jump to...▾ dropdown in the pull request Files changed view shows an outline of new and removed methods immediately:
A few new (green) methods might indicate a straightforward change, while a lot of red and heavy deletions warrants closer attention. "Writing new code is easy," he recalls from his early days as a developer, "and deleting old code is very hard."
