A Virtual Commencement for the Class of 2020
With traditional graduation ceremonies disrupted this year, GitHub Education stepped in to host a community-wide celebration for the newest generation of developers. The event brought together graduates from around the world through a series of digital initiatives, including a dedicated graduation repository and a yearbook built on pull requests.
- 2,600+ students from more than 80 countries walked the stage
- 750 senior projects posted to DEV
- 4,000+ pull requests created on the graduation repository
GitHub’s Director of Education, Vanessa Gennerelli, delivered the commencement address, framing GitHub as a shared space for developers to call home.
“I love this notion of home having a common area, right, or home being a common area. It’s an area that unites your lives in some way. And we often say that GitHub is the home for all developers. And that is, that is what we mean. You get to decide, you know, the drapes and the carpet and the furniture and the language and the license. And with that, Class of 2020, I want to tell you that you will always have a home here in this common area in the cloud.”
Recordings of the speeches and graduate walk are available on GitHub Education’s Twitch Channel, with graduates appearing alphabetically by GitHub username. For a closer look at the community, the Yearbook features profiles and senior quotes from more than two thousand students worldwide.
Building the Yearbook Through Pull Requests
Applications for the Class of 2020 Yearbook opened in mid-May. Graduating students added themselves by submitting a pull request to the graduation repository, which included a markdown file with their name or alias, a senior quote, and a profile picture or a myOctocat creation. Participants also shared a project they were proud of, such as a senior-year or hackathon effort, by publishing a post on DEV tagged with “octograd2020.”
Submissions arrived from students in over 80 countries and regions within hours of the announcement, with hundreds of posts showcasing projects ranging from framework-specific learning journeys to startup launches.
Staff-Picked Student Projects
Space Cats!
Michael O’Connell (@NotoriousENG), a University of Florida student, teamed up with his friend Wilson to build Space Cats!, a 3D action game. Players pilot a spaceship through missions to protect planet Sparkles from Emperor Lovebug’s forces, complete with a comedic storyline and original soundtrack.
Read the DEV post · Visit the GitHub repository
Kerbit
Sam Roebuck (@SamiiRoebuck), a digital media student at the University of Leeds, developed Kerbit to tackle the confusion around recycling. The Progressive Web App uses a custom image classification model to identify household items, determine their material composition, and tell users whether an item is recyclable and where to dispose of it.
Blind Sailing
Anish (@asinghani), a Carnegie Mellon University student, focused his summer project on assisting visually-impaired sailors. The system uses a head-mounted FPGA to deliver multiple audio signals, helping sailors orient themselves in space during races on keelboats in teams of up to four.
By the end of the summer, the solution outperformed comparable GPU- and CPU-based setups on latency and power consumption while improving sailors’ performance and accuracy in competition. Anish’s research was accepted for presentation at the FPGA 2020 conference and is available in the ACM Virtual Library.
These picks only scratch the surface of the hundreds of projects students shared. More work from the next generation of developers can be found under the octograd2020 tag on DEV.
