GitHub’s Most-Read Engineering Stories of 2021

As 2021 wrapped up, GitHub’s blog recapped the year’s most popular posts from its engineering and security teams. The list spans infrastructure overhauls, developer tooling launches, and a notable vulnerability deep dive. Here are the ten stories that drew the most attention.

  1. GitHub’s Engineering Team has moved to Codespaces — An inside look at how and why the company’s developers shifted the majority of GitHub.com development to Codespaces.
  2. Behind GitHub’s new authentication token formats — A technical breakdown of a redesigned token format intended to strengthen security.
  3. Introducing GitHub Copilot: your AI pair programmer — The June announcement of Copilot’s technical preview and the reasoning behind the buzz it generated.
  4. Open Source goes to Mars — How GitHub celebrated the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s flight with a special badge for open source contributors.
  5. npm 7 is now generally available! — The February release of npm 7, which brought notable performance gains to the npm CLI.
  6. Making GitHub’s new homepage fast and performant — How the team behind the redesigned homepage balanced product visuals, animations, and video with page performance.
  7. Privilege escalation with polkit: how to get root on Linux with a seven-year-old bug — A comprehensive vulnerability analysis from GitHub Security Lab.
  8. How we use Web Components at GitHub — The role Web Components play in keeping GitHub’s front end lightweight, fast, and accessible.
  9. Partitioning GitHub’s relational databases to handle scale — How engineers approached the scaling challenges of GitHub’s database systems.
  10. Improving GitHub code search — Details on the December technology preview for a new code search experience.

With this roundup behind them, GitHub is looking ahead to what 2022 will bring.