Universe week, hackable badges, and GitHub's open source dilemma | S02E06 | The GitHub Podcast

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Original language: English

Original video: Universe week, hackable badges, and GitHub’s open source dilemma | S02E06 | The GitHub Podcast · Channel: GitHub · 40:03 · Watch on YouTube

Topics: AI agents, Software engineering with AI, AI infrastructure and hardware, Open source and software ecosystems

Summary

The hosts welcome GitHub leader Martin Woodward to discuss GitHub Universe, its community-focused event and closing keynote, and the strain AI-generated pull requests can place on open-source maintainers. Martin describes new tools for managing contributions and shares the evolution of GitHub’s hackable conference badges, including ways Copilot can help people build badge apps. The conversation turns to keeping creativity alive through tinkering, adapting to AI-assisted development, and the value of fundamentals such as DevOps and networking. The hosts close by recommending open-source projects and sharing details about Universe sessions and badges.

Key points

Martin describes GitHub Universe as a community gathering and a “world’s fair of software,” with sessions available online.
AI has made it easier to submit code, increasing the volume of pull requests and the workload for open-source maintainers.
Maintainers need control over contributions; GitHub has added options such as limiting work-in-progress pull requests and disabling pull requests.
Contributors should understand that code also creates a long-term maintenance burden, and should contribute for useful reasons rather than recognition.
GitHub Universe badges have evolved into hackable devices with features such as an accelerometer, capacitive controls, and Copilot-supported app development.
Martin encourages developers to make time for playful experimentation, treat it as learning, and time-box hobby projects.
AI-assisted development can enable small, personal apps without requiring every project to scale like an enterprise system.
Foundational knowledge of DevOps, networking, and where code runs helps developers understand systems and work effectively with AI.
The hosts recommend ZoomIt, pre-commit alternatives including pre-commit and Pre-K, a GitHub-themed pumpkin project, and a hackable IKEA lamp project.

Chapters

Start	Chapter	Summary
00:03	Welcome and GitHub Universe	The hosts introduce Martin Woodward and discuss his closing keynote, the event’s community focus, and how to watch Universe online.
04:20	AI-generated contributions and maintainer workload	Martin discusses how easier code generation has increased pull requests and why maintainers need ways to manage incoming contributions.
09:10	Tools and advice for open-source contributors	The conversation covers work-in-progress limits, other possible ways to manage low-quality contributions, and advice for new developers.
13:32	The hackable GitHub Universe badge	Martin explains the badge’s origins and describes its hardware, controls, and Copilot-assisted app-building experience.
20:03	Keeping the joy of tinkering	Martin shares how personal projects, curiosity, and giving oneself permission to play help sustain creativity in tech.
24:19	AI, creativity, and the changing shape of software	The hosts discuss changing coding practices, personal expression in software, and the rise of small, purpose-built apps.
29:13	Technical fundamentals for AI-assisted development	Martin and the hosts discuss programming languages, learning through experience, and the value of DevOps and networking fundamentals.
34:06	Cloud learning and Universe resources	GPS introduces the Learn to Cloud curriculum, and Martin points listeners to Universe sessions and the commercial version of the badge.
36:15	Open-source project recommendations and sign-off	The hosts recommend tools and hardware projects before thanking Martin and closing the episode.

Quotes

it’s more of like a world’s fair of software rather than like a vendor conference. — 03:14

Just cuz it’s just cuz you did it doesn’t mean it’s cool, you know — 12:27

give yourself permission to air quotes play. — 22:09

You should have an opinion on what you build and what you ship. — 25:28

Concepts and entities

GitHub Universe, Copilot, open source, Pimoroni, RP2040, MicroPython, Learn to Cloud, ZoomIt, pre-commit, prek, GitHub Actions, Martin Woodward, Cassidy Williams, GPS

Full transcript (original language)

00:03 This is the GitHub podcast, a show dedicated to the topics, trends, stories, and culture in and around the open source developer community on GitHub. I’m Cassidy Williams, aka Cassidoo, and I’m a developer advocate over here at GitHub. And I am here with my lovely co-host, GPS. Hey, GPS. >> [snorts] >> Hey, Cassidy. Hi, everyone. Welcome to a new episode. I am GPS, on the developer experience team here at GitHub. And Cassidy, we have a very special guests with us today, don’t we? >> I know. I am fan girling. It is our head honcho, big boss, Martin. Hey, Martin.

00:37 Welcome to the show. >> How you doing? Well, after that intro, I can’t fail to be underwhelmed. So, thanks for having me on, finally. I’m a former a former host of the GitHub podcast, so it’s >> going to say, yeah, you kicked this off originally, didn’t you? >> Uh me and Neha did it turn for a while. Brian Douglas was also around in the early days, as well. So, yeah, but it’s nice to be back anyway. I love what you’ve done with the show. So, thanks for having me on. >> So, by the time this episode comes out, GitHub Universe is here, and we’re all very, very excited and on site and talking to developers from all around

01:08 the world, online and in person, about open source, about AI, about so many different things. And Martin, you have the closing keynote at Universe. If you wouldn’t mind talking about that and just some of the things that you’re excited about at Universe this year. >> Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. I’m glad you’re recording this a little bit early before we we go on stage, cuz we’re currently running around with our hair on fire. But, I’m going to be covering the fun stuff at the end, kind of talking about the community behind GitHub and all the great things that we can do together. During the show itself, it’s going to be obviously lots about AI. But, what I’m

01:42 also thrilled to see is the talk about like kind of core improvements to the the core platform behind GitHub and some exciting things there. And it doesn’t matter if you know, you’re listening to this and you’re you’re not in Fort Mason in San Francisco when you’re listening to this. Uh the conference is available online and all of the content will also be available after the conference so you can you can catch up at githubuniverse.com. >> Bef- before we dive in, Martin, can I know when was your first Universe? And like what what was your favorite thing of that year?

02:12 >> I was trying to work this out. I’ve actually been to every Universe so I didn’t join GitHub until um 2020, but I went to the early Universes um when I worked at Microsoft cuz we were we were sponsoring. I’ve actually got a a picture of me that I’ll I’ll dig out and share of me in the back of a a taxi carrying like a box of t-shirts to my first GitHub Universe. And uh yeah, it was cool. And coming from the Microsoft world back then, it was like, “What is this?” Cuz I was like I was expecting some sort of developer conference and it

02:42 was it was I was like I was being invited to some underground rave down by the you know, by the key in San Francisco. I didn’t quite know what was happening, but I I knew I’d found my people. Um and then yeah, I’ve been back um every year since. I think there was one I missed along the way, but then uh we moved from there to um Palace of the Fine Arts and things like that. Um uh or sort of Starfleet Headquarters is what I know it as out out towards the gate and then we’ve been at Fort Mason the past few years. So it’s been it’s been good. It’s been interesting to see

03:14 how it’s evolved over the years. Um but importantly, it’s when the whole community comes together and you can kind of feel that by the event, I think. You know, it’s more of like a um a world’s fair of software rather than like a vendor conference. I hope so anyway. >> Well, even even attending online is so fun, too. Where that’s something where before I joined GitHub, I was attending online just cuz I could never make it out to the conference. And I always felt a lot of FOMO wanting to be at the event, but even in even being able to speak from pandemic times, but also just

03:48 tuning in online and stuff, it It so fun to just see open-source people coming together and software people coming together. >> Yeah, indeed. In fact, I remember we had you on, Cassidy, during the pandemic. We did a We We had to very, very quickly pivot to virtual in 2020 and then obviously 2021 as well. And yeah, Cassidy was one of the guest speakers back then. So, that was cool. >> My lights in my office are from that universe cuz I got it all set up. Yeah. >> [laughter] >> Cuz at at the time it was just like a little webcam and and yeah, we had We

04:20 had to make it look a little bit more legitimate. >> I definitely upgraded my kit back then, too. >> Yeah. Yeah, I think everybody slowly but surely elevated as they realized this was their online presence. Wow. Yeah. So, anyway, GitHub Universe has changed and and this year it’s bigger and better and cooler in so many different things. And so, Martin, could you speak a bit more about Yeah, what what is your big talk about? What what should people know? What are >> Yeah, I mean, obviously, during the week we’ve There’s been a lot of AI and a lot

04:50 of talk about Copilot and everything. But, there’s also One of the things I was very reassured to see was actually all of the conversation that was happening about just the core GitHub platform and how we’re able to make it scale to support the increased load of this this AI epoch that we’re in. And then some of the tools and some of the things that we’ve done to kind of make it easier to to maintain projects. That’s one of the areas that concerns me the most because I, you know, I came to GitHub via open source and I I’m sort of long

05:26 time been a member of the open source community. And we’ve kind of always been working under this assumption that it was harder to contribute than to consume, you know? And that the one of the great successes of GitHub and one of the things it did most for the open source community was actually making the pull request, making contribution kind of easy. So, and also making sure that you as a consumer of that open source,

05:57 you were never blocked from tinkering yourself. You can always go tinker and play and do your own, you know, fork the code and make changes, but then make it easy for you to take that fork and and bring it back to the project. That’s great. And that’s that’s really kind of helped, you know, that helped sort of boost open source as a way of building software for the world, which has been fantastic to see. >> [gasps] >> But, since this time last year, since November really, I suppose last year, and the latest models, we saw the ability for

06:30 people to contribute meaningful code to an open source project has has got significantly easier for the person contributing. And we see a lot of our open source maintainers kind of, you know, under a lot of load from people who are sending pull requests, often very very very well-meaning, but sending a PR without really having the the the sort of investment in the community that they might have otherwise needed to have to get to that bar of contribution. And so, we’ve introduced a bunch of tools and a

07:04 bunch of sort of processes and ways to help maintainers, including, controversially, the ability to switch accepting pull request off entirely. >> Right. >> Like, that makes me sad. As as somebody who loves open source, the fact that we added that we had to add that button, that we had to add that as a checkbox, kind of made me sad, but also when you talk to people like Sindre or you talk to other open source maintainers, like they have to have the choice. It’s their project. They have to

07:34 be able to choose if they are taking PRs or not. And so, it’s on us to make that that that choice possible, but it is also a kind of um you know, it’s it’s one of those things that I kind of worry about as we look towards the future of open source and and um you know, how easy it is to to make a contribution. There’s there’s a new set of kind of etiquette and and kind of patterns that people have to learn, I think. It’s interesting times. >> That last bit is exactly what I think about when I think about it. Like it’s like everyone’s learning a new behavior

08:08 now. Where there there’s still people who like properly do pull requests and everything and contribute to projects, of course. But I was looking at the numbers where in January just of this year 2026, there were less than 10 million AI-generated PRs that month. In March it was about 17 million and in August it was about 71 million. Like it’s just been exponentially growing and so with that, it’s both emphasizing good behaviors and bad behaviors cuz that’s just it’s the gigantic averaging

08:39 machine. Um and it’s exciting to be able to see so much growth on so many projects. And it’s really exciting to see like some things are able to be built from nothing so quickly. But at the same time, people need to learn proper behaviors and that is much slower than the speed at which the models are increasing. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um also, there are incentives to get your name like as a as a somebody who’s contributed to an open source project, you know. Um especially as you starting

09:10 out, you kind of want to prove yourself and things and you kind of want to you know, make your mark and saying, “Oh, I’m a I’ve contributed to you know, XYZ project.” Um it is one of those ways and people need to kind of learn that. But also, we need to make sure we build the the tools into the platform so that maintainers don’t get overwhelmed by the noise. Um you know, short of switching it off entirely, what else can we do? Um one of the things that the Tiny Wins team um, sort of Helen and Camilla and

09:40 the the whole team there um, helped do was add a feature that can where you can set work in progress limits for a pull request. So, you can say, “Hey, for a for a new contributor, only allow one in progress pull request from any one person at any one time or three or whatever number it is you want.” And that’s pretty cool because that then that forces you as a contributor decide what is my most important thing that I want to contribute right now. You know, is it this typo spell fix to a comment or is it

10:13 this feature I’ve got or is it something else? And you know, if you want to get it merged, you have to kind of make that choice as to which one you want to have um, submitted to the project right now. So, that’s cool and there’s other ways to do it. There’s other things we can look at as well and there’s other controls we’ve got in place, but um, it’s in I don’t think we’ve yet really figured out what the entire solution is for everybody. So, I think we’ve got to have lots of different choices and allow projects to to decide themselves what’s right for them including using AI to um, automatically create reproductions of

10:46 issues that are raised or using AI to automatically close PR’s that don’t meet your requirements. That sort of thing, you know, there’s ways we can use AI to to to sort of fight low quality contribution as well as um, help make things more secure. >> I think you touched on something that I see a lot because you know, we have the increase of AI usage and all these models coming out and at the same time we have a difficult hiring market and then you have the messaging of like

11:20 build projects, contribute to open source, right? So, we have we almost have like this trifecta of like things are going to go bad because everything’s in place for things to go bad. But, I’m curious if you’ve thought of advice for let’s say I’m new into software dev. I’m trying to get you know, a good contribution out there. But perhaps because I’m new, I don’t know what a good contribution looks like. Do you have any advice for me? >> It doesn’t hurt to start something new yourself to start building a community. My

11:53 son is new in tech and you know, he’s he was one of the sort of lucky ones to be able to get a graduate role recently. And you know, he was creating a project to do his own sort of AI framework and just creating that, learning that, learning how to do the VS code integration, learning how to kind of work with the community was good for them because it it it helped them kind of you know, just learn how to work with a team and things. So that was cool. I think as well as you’ve got to understand the motivations like

12:27 what why should the maintainer accept your contribution? Just cuz it’s just cuz you did it doesn’t mean it’s cool, you know, and an understanding that when you contribute to an open source project, you’re kind of you yes, you are handing like this glorious gift of code to the project which is cool and thank you. But you’re also handing a the debt of maintenance to that that team to maintain that code going forward. And when you’re new, you kind of drastically underestimate what what

13:00 that burden of maintenance is for the life lifetime of the project cuz you haven’t seen as much you know, long-term maintenance of code. Don’t always do something new, contribute for the right reasons, contribute because it’s a feature that you’ve got that’s useful to you and you’ve used it. Don’t be contributing just because I want to get my name in lights. Like that’s that’s the worst probably the worst reason for contributing to open source, sadly. Um, but yeah, contribute to that. And then in terms of building experience, it’s

13:32 more the best experience you can get is by starting something new, running a project, and and kind of, um, you know, trying to solve a business pain for somebody. That’s probably the most transferable skill. >> So, speaking of all of these projects, you’ve worked on a very cool project for GitHub Universe itself, and it’s the badge. Could you tell us a little bit more about why a conference badge is such a big deal? >> Cuz it’s >> GitHub. So, and then this is I actually this year I was the least involved in the badges I’ve ever been, unfortunately. But but but yet it’s the best badge ever, so that kind of tells

14:05 you something. But um >> [laughter] >> Yeah, Avni and the whole team have done a great job with with the conference badge. Um, it start Those badges started actually in 2022, I think it was. We We started with a with a hackable badge, and it was um I’m friends with some guys at a company called Pimoroni, uh, who are based in Sheffield in the UK. And they had a a conference badge already that was e-ink based. And I was like, “Ooh, that’s cool.” Um, and it’s based on an RP2040

14:38 chip, and I was like, “Oh, and which I was involved in the creation of with the Raspberry Pi Foundation.” And like that all that’s done open source and things, so that was all cool. Um worked with them, um, to create a custom version of it for the 2022 version, for like some of our you know, uh, GitHub Stars and influencers and things as kind of like a special treat. And it was so popular that we then brought it back to the full conference the following year and and the following years after that. And then last year we, rather than make it e-ink, we took the decision to put a battery

15:10 into it, and a rechargeable battery, which >> So cool. >> It is a whole thing, because now you have to worry about life though. >> But >> It it does just mostly from a health and safety point of view because you don’t want to like you don’t want lipo cells you have to you don’t want them exploding on people and all that sort of stuff and so you have to encase them in like a hard shell and all this sort of thing to make it work and you have to worry about the weight of the thing how long it’s going to last all that sort of stuff but by putting a screen on the badge

15:42 um it really we just saw a difference last year in how much more people understood that this badge was a computer and that it was capable of doing things and we saw everything from people creating apps and games and things to people you know creating a custom news that works on this on the last year’s conference badge which is pretty cool or people somebody ported Doom to it and it’s completely playable and all that’s cool. So this year what we’ve done with the badges it’s similar hardware to last

16:16 year apart from we we’ve added a couple of kind of major innovations from it so the first thing that we’ve done is we’ve added and it sounds dumb but we added an accelerometer cuz what we noticed is people carry their badges and they dangle down on their necks and it looks cool but then when they’re looking at their badge they kind of flip it up and they look directly at their badge and their badge is now upside down if you like. Um and we were noticing people kind of getting strangling themselves trying to hold the badge in the right direction and all this sort of stuff that’s what we did was we just added an

16:48 accelerometer and then in the firmware we flipped the screen 180 degrees and so when you lift it up you look at the screen and it’s the right way up for you and then you pop it back down and the screen is the right way for somebody looking at it so a small thing and it cost only a couple of extra cents per badge but a big quality of life improvement. >> That’s amazing. I have I have the I think the last e-ink badge at >> There we go. >> I’m so excited to have like the big cousin come into play and compare the two. >> Well, we also did we do add the the the hardware on the new badges as well.

17:23 It has like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the new badges. We don’t enable Wi-Fi for the conference cuz it turns out having, you know, 4,000 hackable badges on your conference network is like scares your Wi-Fi network provider extraordinary amounts. We We do have a couple of light little beacons near the hack your badge area and things like this, but but mostly we don’t do that. And then the other thing we did hardware-wise is um cuz we print nice designs on it, and the you know, we we have like nice graphics and things, and we’ve got nice graphics on the new one that will kind of look

17:55 cool and are very gear hobby, but actually it turns out that these PCB graphics are capacitive controls. And so you can when you flip it up, you can now use it as a full gaming system. And so we’ve set the PCB up so it actually feels and looks an awful lot like a gaming system. So you can sit there and play games and stuff, and just use the the printed circuit board kind of buttons as as as hardware buttons. And so again, that increases the kind of playability and the immediate hands-on, I want to

18:28 build something with this. And to make that easier, what we’ve done is we’ve added this Copilot instructions into the the Badger repo where where you can go to to learn how to create apps for your badge. We’ve added Copilot instructions there, and an agent set up the So you can take your your agent and point it at the source code, and then say write me an app to do XYZ, and it can write you that app. And it knows everything about MicroPython. It knows everything about how to connect to MicroPython running on

19:01 a badge, which it means it has to connect over serial and do some stuff to a repo ring on a badge. It knows all about that. So it can actually deploy the app to the badge for you, test it, and then run it on the badge and you’ve got tada an app on your badge just by typing a single prompt into the copilot app or whatever. >> I’m so excited. >> I know, right? >> I can’t wait to play with it more because it I I like dabbling with hardware things, but it’s just scary enough that I’m like I’m going to blow something up. So the fact that it just kind of works, I can’t wait.

19:32 >> And the best thing is that’s why this is so good for like an event like GitHub cuz it it allows you to just play in a sandbox and get back to why you got into code in the first place, you know, the love of code, that that love of tinkering and making stuff happen. Um you can get do that again, but it’s on a device that if you if you nuke it, if you do something horribly wrong to the badge, you can just press a couple of buttons, put it into like a flash state, drop it drop the backup image onto it

20:03 and it’ll restore the badge back to the factory default settings kind of thing. So um yeah, it’s very very very hard to kind of really brick the badge, you know, you can you can always restore back and then add some stuff to it and go play with it again. So yeah, it’s cool. It’s great fun to experiment with. >> That was kind of leading into my next question which I was going to preface by saying it’s probably a bit of a philosophical one. >> Okay. >> But you have obviously been in this space for a while, like the tech space, right? >> But you’ve always had sort of

20:34 this energy or this like sort of excitement around things that I feel like people tend to lose later in their career. Like you you like to tinker, like one thing about you is that you love the badge. You will talk about the badge. You’ll Oh, I I was able to do this and even if it’s not Universe time, like you’ll pull out the the one from last year. You’ll show things off. And you always have this excitement. So I wonder how how do you keep that? How do you encourage that in yourself? And because

21:06 I feel like there’s a little bit of a trend of like people being a little too perhaps too serious in tech and I think we lose a little bit of soul of creativity of funness in the things that we build due to that. So I’m just wondering like how how have you been able to keep that throughout your career? >> Well, I don’t think anyone could accuse the host of this podcast for being too serious. So there’s that for a start. But >> We’re just better than everyone. >> [laughter] >> You need to is it’s it’s how I keep saying cuz I if I just did my job all day every day, I’d be like deleting

21:37 emails and approving expenses and you know, saying no to people when they want to travel to conferences or something like that. Like it it it it it gets you down. Um tinkering with things, playing with things is is what keeps me sane and and I think the reason we all got into tech is cuz well, A uh we like solving problems and we like like learning new things and then B, we want to put money on the table. You know what I mean? We want to put food on the table and all that sort of stuff. Like we we shouldn’t underestimate that. Um I

22:09 originally wanted to be a physics teacher and then realized actually, you know, I could earn a lot more money. I’m a failed physics teacher. I could earn you know, a lot more money being in tech kind of thing. Um So yeah, to me it’s just like keep keep doing the things, keep finding the time to do to scratch that itch and just be creative. Um and also um like give yourself permission to air quotes play. Call it learning and then all of a sudden play is now an acceptable kind of personal development

22:41 activity. Um but just give yourself permission to do that because that’s how you learn so much. Like I learned I was running um a local model on a Raspberry Pi with a hardware AI accelerator and a camera attached and like learning cuz I wanted to do that to basically um it sounds really dumb, but I wanted to capture a log of vehicles coming onto my house so I could see what their number plates were and then I had a thing of the thing and then I could search find them. You know, it should it

23:15 was a project I kind of wanted to do. I was like, well, I can probably do that now. Especially with Copilot at my side because um I am to your point, GPS, I’ve been around a long time. So, a lot of times I was not starting projects because I’ve been around long enough to know how long how much code that was going to take me to write kind of thing. But now now got Copilot I I code again at the weekends and so I can just kick it off and help me go build some stuff. So, just go start some things, go play and um use it as a learning exercise. Um but also time box it so that you don’t it’s very easy to rat hole and and just

23:47 spend too much time on things. So, you know, know when something’s good enough and just ship it and share it with somebody. >> I love it. I love the play and just call it learning. That’s awesome. >> That’s great. >> Yeah, give yourself permission. You know what I mean? That’s what you have to do. >> Mm. And I think a lot of people kind of mourn the craft of coding because it has changed so much, especially this year. But if you look back 10 years ago, coding wasn’t going to look the same in 2026 as it did in 2016 or in 2006. If

24:19 you keep going back, keep going back. And they’re change is very inevitable, especially in tech and always has been. >> Yeah. >> And taking advantage of the changes to be just like, how can I take what I know now to have that opportunity to learn something new and play? It It keeps me motivated, at least personally, because I I can take something and be like, okay, well, now I don’t have to worry about writing this regex anymore cuz that that a bot can do for me and I can focus on the fun stuff. >> Well, and there’s a lot of um in in Britain we would call it snobbishness, but I guess gatekeeping or whatever in tech, you know what I mean?

24:52 There’s a lot of like, oh, in my day I had to, you know, handwrite assembly or whatever. And I mean, if you look at the kids today, they’ve got it down. They can do everything with a set of AI agents. And you know, they just build a squad together. Um and it’s amazing to see what they can do. It’s okay to code differently and to do things differently as long as you kind of are not um as long as you inject that that taste, that the creativity, the kind of a judgment that that’s needed to build stuff well, and that you’re not just uh

25:28 you’re not just a slot factory. You’re not just kind of you know, emitting low-quality things for for that nobody really wants. It’s you should have an opinion on what you build and what you ship. It should it should be opinionated. Um and it should have taste and that should you know, you should inject your personality into it as much as possible. And the hobby projects are a great way of doing that. You know, quite often if you’re building yet another kind of invoice tracking system for work or you know, fixing an algorithm for your insurance company, like it that stuff

26:01 can can um suck the joy out of your life. So, yeah, go build some hobby projects. Go have some fun. Go learn. And I always try to learn in a different technology to what I’m writing with that day. So, when I was a .NET developer back in the day, I would do open source for fun. And then if I was doing a Java gig, I would do Sorry, I would do a Java open source for fun. And if I was doing a Java gig for work, I’ll do like a .NET or a Python project for fun kind of thing. So, I think it’s good to kind of just try different things to just keep you sharp and learn stuff. >> It’s been fun and very magical teaching

26:34 people who have nothing to do with the tech industry that they can build now. That that’s been that’s been so so fun for me. Where where so many of my friends who just they they think what I do is mystical. They don’t fully understand what my job is. And being able to put a computer in front of them and be just like, “What if you made an app right now?” And having that accessibility to kind of let them put whatever their brain is to paper, to code, to screen, and make it happen has been the most fun thing. Cuz normally I

27:05 would say like, “Well, we’re going to start with HTML.” And then go and then slowly but surely let them put their name on a screen with a JavaScript line or something. The fact that they can now make something way more exciting, even though they probably aren’t going to ship it or do anything with it, the fact that we’re able to unlock that for people is I I think that’s a really empowering and cool thing to be able to show people now. >> Definitely. And that’s what’s fascinating about this new kind of AI epoch as well, that it the rise of the ephemeral app and the rise of the app

27:36 for kind of one to two people. Um and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And I know that, you know, as pro devs, that can be scary cuz we’re like, “Oh, no, you need to scale this out and have massive enterprise architectures.” But sometimes you don’t. Sometimes actually it running on a laptop for one person is just fine or it being hosted on GitHub pages or whatever is just fine. Like that’s scale enough, you know? Um and it’s knowing when that comes in. Also, let’s be honest, it’s going to keep us in work for a long, long time as

28:08 well because there’s going to be a number of those kind of individual apps for one that suddenly need to scale for a million kind of thing. And then then that’s where pro devs need to come in because we know about scale, we know about how to build systems that have more than one developer contributing to them, which is, you know, a problem in itself, and how you how you can kind of structure those code bases and things. So, every time we’ve been through one of these changes, one of these epochs in computer science, you know, from from the mainframe to client server, from client server to kind of desk you know,

28:41 everybody’s got a desktop to mobile to whatever, we’ve seen a a massive uptick in the number of people who can be a developer, and we’re seeing a massive uptick in the amount of code created. What we don’t see is less quality, you know, rubbish applications, if you like. We we we see this constant bubbling up, rising up to the top, and just a widening of who can call themselves a developer, which is great, cuz it means the the developer ecosystem becomes more diverse, which which in

29:13 itself is a healthier ecosystem. >> Do you have in mind any technical skills that you feel like people should focus on more, or are you are you seeing a pattern where where it’s like, “Oh, man, if people could only do this more, perhaps the quality would increase, or their time spent with AI would be better used, or or something like that?” >> What we are seeing is the number of languages people use is trending down to about four and a half, kind of thing. I know it sounds silly, but we’re seeing a

29:43 reduction in the amount of languages, computer languages, people need. Um people talk about, “Oh, should we create a computer language that’s great for LLMs?” It already exists. It’s called TypeScript and Python. like, because there’s so much corpus out there for the for those models to be able to play with that kind of language, and there’s so much so many deep ecosystems of modules to be able to pull in components and things like this. Um the you know, the the biggest thing is

30:15 as well as giving yourself permission to um to play. Giving yourself permission to go on the journey as well. Um people think that you can go from if I know enough stuff, I’ll be an expert. Um and actually, it’s going on that journey, learning the stuff, that gives you the judgment and the skills that makes you an expert. And so, don’t underestimate the benefits of going on the journey,

30:50 because then you learn, oh, if I do these types of systems, like it’s get, you know, there’ll be dragons, bad things happens, whereas if I build it this way, kind of good things happen, and you can apply that to lots of different technologies. So, I don’t think there’s a need, in the old days it would be, oh, go learn, you know, this particular framework, or go learn you know, V tool, whatever it is, you know? Um, that’s less true now. Um, you just need a basic understanding of a certain set of skills, and the main reason you need those is to get your first job in tech. And once you’ve got

31:23 your first job in tech, and you start to prove you can add value, then, um, I think you can kind of, um, you know, having to learn different languages isn’t as important as it used to be, because the AI can assist you, as long as you know how languages generally work. >> I think a lot of it, too, is just infrastructure in general. The The infrastructure companies, open-source softwares, things that be, are the things that people should really learn. If they’re If they If you want some hard advice, I personally think, like, yes, you should play, dabble in a

31:56 language, but at the same time, TypeScript, Python, those are Those are pretty big. But, understanding like how a system can work, and how you can tinker with it in different ways, again, there’s tinkering, there’s playing elements of it, but if I were to declare to someone today, if you want to go into tech, I would start by learning a lot of those, like, DevOps fundamentals. >> Yes, [clears throat] we we we do see that people who are better at DevOps can be are accelerated faster with AI. Um, I also, like, fundamentals-wise, knowing

32:29 about networking, um, knowing about like where the code actually runs that I’m executing, and where where it’s running in the stack kind of thing is useful to help you understand how that system fits together. Um and the problem is when people say learn networking, they get a book out and it’s all like the OSI seven stack whatever blah blah blah and it gets very dull very very quickly. There there’s only the basics you need to learn to be successful, but you do need to understand is this code running on in my browser in on the client machine? Is

33:03 this running on the server? How are those two things going to talk to each other? If code’s running down here in the the client, how is it able to access some data that sits on the server? Like understanding those concepts I think really really helps. So I guess what’s that? Systems thinking? Systems understanding? I don’t I never did computer science. This is all I’m all kind of, you know, so like I’m not sure what the exact module is you need to take there, but yeah, that that sort of thing. >> There’s a course somewhere. There’s a lot of free courses >> they’re going into for too much detail almost. I kind of want to do like the

33:34 the basics, you know, the YouTube version of the what you need to understand about networking. Cuz once you know about IP addresses and kind of a little bit about netmasks and a little bit about kind of how the internet works in terms of routing tables, you probably know enough. >> What’s great is I’ve not had to learn that. >> [laughter] >> I’ve had had such a front-end focus in so much of my career where I like like you said, little bits here and there, but now because of all of these tools, it’s filling in the gaps just enough where I need them and I could still ship stuff. And also because we’re talking

34:06 about learn this, we got to talk about learn to cloud GPS. You got your free open-source curriculum for teaching people about the cloud. learntocloud.guide, we cover Linux, Bash, networking, programming, cloud platform, DevOps, and security. Come check us out. >> We We pretty much are wrap around GitHub. We I I’m quite proud of this curriculum cuz we teach a lot from the beginning of like forking repos, opening issues, pull requests, things that are like quite tangible in terms of like

34:38 real roles from the start versus like simulating it in like a sandbox or or something like so it’s quite it’s quite powerful to feel on your learning journey that you’re doing stuff that like engineers in paying jobs are doing. So we built the curriculum around that, but sysadmins and dev that’s my background like operations. I feel like we were always sort of kind of seen as like second class citizens like oh yeah like the operations people. Because and we would see like the the software devs always like they had

35:11 this prestige like yeah we write code like you handle the servers who cares you know. >> [laughter] >> But now it’s like full circle and now it’s like oh like yeah we know how to do all that stuff. So more than ever I think the skills are are are very important very relevant and as soon as people who will have the software dev skills gain the other side oh it’s like it’s game over. So I’m very excited to see like where stuff heads when that happens but yeah check out learntocloud.guide if you’re looking for an open source curriculum to learn the fundamentals of cloud engineering.

35:42 >> Didn’t even mean to make it a plug and it was perfect. Fit in. >> Perfect timing exactly. >> Well I am looking at the time we are running out of time and so before we wrap up Martin is there anything people should be aware of at Universe for checking things out later things that they should know. >> Yeah I mean all the sessions are available online so go take a look. The sessions are going to start tomorrow now. Um go grab those. Uh while the badge itself wasn’t exclusive for people who were at the event it’s based on the Tofty badge from Pimoroni which is the commercial version. It

36:15 doesn’t have things like the accelerometer and the gaming controls but if you want to go play with one of those you can you can buy that commercially as well. Um but yeah make sure you check out all of the sessions. Uh check out my my end notes from the from the conference as well if you want to have some fun. But yeah, that’s about it really for the event. >> Awesome. And also at the end of every single episode, we talk about open source projects that we like. And so I will start off with mine. Mine it’s honestly kind of silly but it’s so nice. It’s called ZoomIt. If you have a PC, it is built in to your machine. But

36:50 Microsoft released ZoomIt for Mac and it’s so nice where if you’re presenting your screen, you can zoom in on things and and and point at things and it’s really really nice. >> So I was super skeptical because in the Mac I used to do control and you know, I use the built-in kind of accessibility controls. But the the thing that was cool for me was the ability to draw on the screen and just some of the basic stuff like that was super handy. And so bringing over some of those keyboard shortcuts because we have to jump between PC and the Mac quite a lot as well. So that’s really cool. >> it’s so nice to just have it work on both machines and it works. It’s great.

37:25 >> What about you GPS? >> So pre-K is a tool So if you’re in the Python ecosystem, every ecosystem has their equivalent. But there is Oh, I guess this is cross ecosystems. Pre-commit. I’m sure you’re familiar with pre-commit. So essentially they’re actions that run before you commit something, right? Right. Pre-K is a version course like everything these days rebuilt in Rust. It is so much faster

37:56 and as you know, we’re pushing code more. There are moments where you there where there are things that like make you pause or you’re like, “Oh, I wish this was faster.” For me, one of those was pre-commit. Like So pre-K is so much faster. It runs, you know, everything that you you would have in your pre-commit. But yeah, it’s just very very efficient and I love it. It’s open source. It’s like a single dev working on it was quite passionate about this one particular issue. Definitely check it out if you’re in the Yeah, like I love those types of

38:27 projects where it’s like there’s this one thing that I just hate. How can I fix it? And it’s so good at it. So, definitely check it out. >> that. >> And I’m going to do a shameless plug then for mine. So, as we’re as the show’s coming out, it’s just Halloween. And so, we have I’ve on my repo on martingower.com/martywoodward, you can there’s a pumpkin pie project which is here it is. Um and this is basically a 3D printed GitHub inspired pumpkin. And the source code for this one runs on a tiny little

38:58 microcontroller with lights. And we’ll actually it’s hooked up to your GitHub Actions credits. So, what could be scarier at Halloween than running out of Actions credits, you know? And so, it’ll animate and change color as you’re running out of Actions credits and then animate when your Actions credits get renewed. So, that’s one. And then another one I’ll I’ll give you a link to you for the show notes, but IKEA do accessories, but they’re not all completely hackable. And there’s a growing community of people like hacking these. And one of them was a was from a developer

39:32 PH1P. And they’ve got a project to kind of stick what’s called an ESP32 which is like a tiny $1 microprocessor on the back of an IKEA IKEA lamp. And then you can turn it in kind of a into a smart display. So, I’ll give you that project as well. >> Oh, wow. I could really use that. >> Yeah, exactly. It’d be great. >> Yeah, so nice and easy. Well, that is awesome. I loved chatting with you, Martin. Thank you so much for being our guest today and for helping us close out Universe. I’m so excited for that. That being said, I’ve been Cassidy Williams.

40:03 You can find me at cassidoo, c a s s i d o o on GitHub and most things on the internet. >> And I’ve been GPS. Find me at madebygps everywhere where you look for people. Martin, any final words? >> No, I’m Martin Woodward. Find me at Martin Woodward on social media if you want to shout at me. And thank you for listening to us. >> Bye.