When a diverse set of presenters and participants comes together for a conference, everyone benefits from the variety of experiences, perspectives and voices in the room. We realize, however, that ticket costs can sometimes be prohibitive for individuals from underrepresented groups. That's why we've partnered with six fantastic organizations to distribute CodeConf tickets to their members. Each one has a mission to connect, support and/or educate people from backgrounds underrepresented in tech. This will help us build a diverse audience and a great experience for everyone.

Our partner groups have shared a little more about their work and upcoming projects, as well as details of how they're distributing their CodeConf tickets. Read on to get inspired, involved, and potentially grab a ticket for yourself, and remember too that you can help on a personal level by choosing to purchase the "scholarship" ticket option on the registration page.

Black Girls CODE

Black Girls CODE is an international non-profit that empowers young women of color to enter the tech space as builders and creators by introducing them to coding and technology. www.blackgirlscode.org

Upcoming events:

• June 19th - 21st: All Girls Hackathon, Oakland
• June 20th: Oracle Academy's Greenfoot brought to you by Black Girls CODE, Memphis
• June 20th: Introduction to Javascript Workshop, New York
• July 24th-26th: All Girls Hackathon, New York
• July: 1 week summer camps, Raleigh, NC and Washington D.C.
• August: 1 week summer camps, Bay Area and New York

Ticket Details: We will be distributing our tickets directly to the Black Girls CODE network.

Coding While Black

Coding While Black is headquartered in Chicago; our focus is code education, professional development, and entrepreneurship. We welcome blacks in technology from around the globe to become active members of a growing community that supports, encourages, and connects black technology professionals. Members can post articles, share events, find other black technology professionals to connect with, and enjoy community features. www.codingwhileblack.com

Ticket details: Coding While Black is excited to partner in promoting CodeConf to a diverse audience. We will be distributing the tickets by sharing them with members who have volunteered with us and/or have been active participants in our community.

Girl Geek Dinner Nashville

The Nashville chapter of Girl Geek Dinner was founded with the goal to encourage and inspire Nashville’s young women and girls to pursue technology careers. Girl Geek Dinners have grown into an international movement. The ask is simple to sponsors — buy dinner and drinks for girl geeks, invite speakers and encourage networking amongst the girl geeks. www.ggdnashville.com

Upcoming events:

• June 5th: Eventbrite is hosting our next Girl Geek Dinner where they are flying in 3 Software Engineers and a Product Manager to Nashville to give lighting tech talks.

• Third Thursday of every month: Code & Pinot night is a great opportunity for beginner programmers to come out and get a taste of what programming is like. Bring your favorite wine and learn to code! Food provided.

Ticket details: We plan to distribute the tickets to our Girl Geeks through a coding contest and drawing. Coding contest: the first to give the correct answer will get a ticket. Drawing: we will randomly select a winner from contest entries.

Lesbians Who Tech

Lesbians Who Tech is a global community of 9,000 queer women in tech. It exists to provide value to queer women in tech, a demographic that is rarely represented in both the tech community and the LGBTQ community. We've hosted events in 22 cities worldwide and focus on connecting our community, increasing visibility and increasing women in tech and leadership positions. www.lesbianswhotech.org

Upcoming events:

• August 27th-30th: Lesbians Who Tech (and allies) European Summit, Berlin
• October 1st-4th: Tech & Innovation Summit, NYC

Ticket details: We'll be offering the tickets through Lesbians Who Tech chapters in the Midwest

Rails Girls Atlanta

Rails Girls Atlanta is an encouraging place for women to take the plunge into learning to code. We host monthly meetups and socials where dev-minded ladies can ask questions, learn from others, and get the support they need to be successful. www.meetup.com/Rails-Girls-Atlanta

Upcoming events:

• June 1st: All the Nerdy Ladies Social at Joystick. No agenda, just a time to visit and catch up with other nerdy lady types.

Ticket details: We’re planning to raffle off the tickets at our May meetup.

Trans*H4CK

Trans*H4CK is a hackathon and speaker series that tackles social problems by developing new and useful open source tech products that benefit the trans and gender non-conforming communities, while bringing visibility to transgender tech innovators and entrepreneurs.

We are planning to launch an online hackathon space this year--stay tuned! http://www.transhack.org

Ticket details: We will be distributing our CodeConf tickets through the Trans*H4CK network.

CodeConf 2015 will take place in Nashville on June 25 and 26. Ariel Waldman is one of many incredible speakers that will take the stage at the Bell Tower to share her expertise. We asked her some questions about her experiences at NASA, her vision for the future, and more. Check out her answers below!

Q: Why is collaboration important to you, and how do you think it can further scientific exploration and discovery?

A: To me, multidisciplinary collaboration is at the heart of furthering scientific exploration and discovery. In my work, I especially focus on unusual collaborations between people from different backgrounds. By having a fresh set of eyes from those who solve problems across a wide range of industries, new concepts emerge and go on to influence scientific processes, communication and discoveries in unexpected ways. Science doesn't require serendipity, but I'd argue it's significantly disadvantaged without it.

Q: You spoke at the very first CodeConf in 2011, and we’re excited to have you back since you’ve been doing so much exciting stuff in the meantime. What was your experience of CodeConf 2011, and what are you looking forward to seeing at CodeConf 2015?

A: CodeConf was fantastic. The community was so excited to have a wide range of topics at a "code" conference and I think it really helped open everyone up to new opportunities and aspirations. I think what made CodeConf 2011, and what will make CodeConf 2015, so special was the unexpected connections people end up drawing and a broadening of how big the universe to play in is.

Q: GitHub had the pleasure of hosting Science Hack Day in 2014, and we’ll do so again this year. What is the purpose of Science Hack Day, and what were some of the most exciting projects to come out of that event?

A: The mission of Science Hack Day is to get excited and make things with science! Science Hack Day is a 2-day-all-night event where anyone excited about making weird, silly or serious things with science comes together in the same physical space to see what they can prototype within 24 consecutive hours. Designers, developers, scientists and anyone who is excited about making things with science are welcome to attend – no experience in science or hacking is necessary, just an insatiable curiosity.

One of the projects I loved that came out of the Science Hack Day SF at GitHub last year was an interactive planetarium where you could explore the distance between stars, planets and constellations using your hands via a Kinect. I loved the idea of making a planetarium more physical. Because the code was made open source on GitHub, the project was then hacked on further and installed as a temporary exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, where school kids, families and even an astronaut got to try it out!

Q: Tell us about NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC). How can we participate in and contribute to the vision of this project?

A: NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is arguably the coolest program at NASA - they fund and nurture all the radical, sci-fi-esque ideas that could one day transform future space missions. Submarines on Titan, human hibernation to Mars, comet hitchhiking space probes, you name it. Some utilize computer science and computer vision techniques – one project analyzes light versus dark areas on the Moon so that a lunar rover could navigate staying in continuous sunlight, thus able to be more efficient by having continuous solar power. The cool thing about NIAC is that they accept proposals from anyone every year around October, so if you have a credible idea you'd like to do further research and prototyping on that could transform a future space mission, you can apply!

Follow Ariel on Twitter for more updates on all of her projects, and grab your CodeConf ticket now! We can't wait to see you in Nashville next month.

With the new billing manager role, you can invite individuals to manage the billing details of your organization without giving them access to code. The new role enables a user to:

• Upgrade or downgrade the organization’s plan.
• Update payment details like the credit card on file.
• View history of past transactions and download receipts.
• Receive receipts via email.

Billing managers won’t:

• Be able to create or access repositories in your organization.
• See private members of your organization.
• Be seen in the list of organization members.

Leave the payment details to your wonderful finance team, and get back to your code!

For more information on adding a billing manager to your organization, check out the help article.

We thought you'd like a preview of what we have in store for CodeConf 2015 in June before discounted ticket sales end on May 25th. We're beyond excited to be welcoming speakers from all over the globe and from companies and organizations of all sizes, who work on every facet of open source technology and represent many different parts of the community. Here's a sneak peak at some of the excellent speakers who will be presenting at CodeConf this year:

• Eric Levine of Airbnb
• Casey Rosenthal of Netflix
• Christine Abernathy of Facebook
• Corinne Warnshuis of Girl Develop It

This is just a sampling of the amazing line-up. Check out the full preview over at the CodeConf site.

But wait there's more!

• Reserve a spot in one of our hands-on workshops led by expert trainers. Space is limited, so register early.
• Join us the evening before the conference to enjoy the company of the Nashville open source community and grab your badge early. You won't want to miss the food from legendary Hattie B's.
• Register for a discounted room at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. Shuttles will depart at convenient intervals so you can easily get to and from the conference. By booking a room at the Opryland instead of a downtown hotel, you save about $100.
• There are still a few sponsorship opportunities left, including our scholarship program. Check out the prospectus and drop us a line at events@github.com.
• Find more details about everything we have in store for you on the new codeconf.com.

Lastly, we'd like to thank everyone who took the time to send us their ideas. We were overwhelmed by the quality and creativity of the 300+ proposals submitted. You are the heart of CodeConf.

Ticket prices go up to $399 on May 25th and we can't wait to see you in Nashville, so what are you waiting for?

Pride week is coming early to GitHub! We're throwing two LGBTQ-focused events on Tuesday June 2nd and Wednesday June 3rd, and will also be launching our 2015 Pridetocat shirt.

Patchwork

• Tuesday June 2nd
• 6:30pm-9:30pm
• GitHub HQ, 88 Colin P. Kelly Jr. St, San Francisco

Join us for a special LGBTQ edition of Patchwork! No coding experience is needed to participate in this free hands-on workshop with support and talks from GitHubbers and Teagan Widmer from Refuge Restrooms. All LGBTQ folks welcome.

Register yourself here, or learn more about our Patchwork events.

Pride Celebration

• Wednesday June 3rd
• 6:00pm-9:00pm
• GitHub HQ, 88 Colin P. Kelly Jr. St, San Francisco

We're hosting a celebration of the great things happening in the LGBTQ tech community! Celebrate Pride with old friends, make new ones, and learn about some amazing initiatives from organizations like Trans*H4CK, Lesbians Who Tech, Maven, GaymerX, and oSTEM!

We will also be launching our 2015 Pridetocat shirts, which will be available on site, with all proceeds going to Trans*H4CK, Lesbians Who Tech, and Maven.

Register now to attend! Open to all LGBTQ-identified folks and allies.

GitHub is used by government agencies to collaborate on all sorts of interesting things, from software that aids first responders to White House policy, but sometimes agencies require a level of assurance that can only be afforded by a platform running on their own infrastructure.

Starting with version 2.2.2, released yesterday, AMIs for GitHub Enterprise, GitHub's self-hosted offering, are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region, allowing US customers with specific regulatory requirements to run GitHub Enterprise in a federally compliant cloud environment.

What is GovCloud?

GovCloud is an isolated Amazon Web Services environment used by US government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels, along with contractors, researchers, educational institutions, and other US customers.

In terms of boxes checked, GovCloud has received a federal authority to operate (ATO), and conforms with U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) restrictions, Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) requirements, and Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Security Model (CSM) Levels 3-5.

Getting started

You can begin using GitHub Enterprise in GovCloud today by requesting a free, 45-day trial, and customers that are already using GitHub Enterprise can migrate from other GitHub Enterprise deployment platforms to GovCloud by following these instructions.

If you have any questions about using GitHub in GovCloud, or GitHub + Government in general, please visit the AWS GovCloud page, or feel free to reach out to government@github.com at any time — we'd love to hear from you.

Happy (compliant) collaborating!

Prepare yourself for the future with the new Atom shirt and Atom Coasters.

Available in the GitHub Shop

We are happy to introduce GitHub's Engineering Blog to the world. Starting today, you can read details about our infrastructure, learn about our development practices, and hear about the knowledge we've gained while running the world's largest code collaboration platform.

You can also get updates by following our Engineering Twitter account @GitHubEng.

Happy reading!

On April 8-9, Git Merge returned to Europe, this time to La Gaite Lyrique in Paris. Over 200 people attended to celebrate ten years of Git, and with your help we raised over $15,000 in ticket sales, which was then donated entirely to the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Head over to git-merge.com to check out recorded sessions from expert speakers representing Google, Microsoft, SAP, Twitter, GitHub, Atlassian, and Amazon. These excellent talks focus on how teams use Git, as well as the implementation challenges of large Git deployments.

Thanks to everyone who attended! Make sure to follow @github on Twitter for announcements about Git Merge 2016.

We love all the awesome little Octicons. Now you can wear Octicons...tons of Octicons!

Available in the GitHub Shop

Communicating ideas that combine code, data and visualizations can be hard, especially if you're trying to collaborate in realtime with your colleagues.

Whether you're a researcher studying Wikipedia, an astronomer investigating the movements of galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood or a data-scientist at fashion retailer Stitch Fix, producing insights from data and sharing is a common challenge.

Jupyter notebooks solve this problem by making it easy to capture data-driven workflows that combine code, equations, text and visualizations and share them with others. From today Jupyter notebooks render in all their glory right here on GitHub.

With Git Large File Storage and Jupyter notebook support, GitHub has never been a better place to version and collaborate on data-intensive workflows. With more than 200,000 Jupyter notebooks already on GitHub we're excited to level-up the GitHub-Jupyter experience.

Looking to get started? Simply commit a .ipynb file to a new or existing repository to view the rendered notebook. Alternatively if you're looking for some inspiration then check out this incredible gallery of Jupyter notebooks.

One year ago today, Atom went from private alpha to open source software in hopes that the sunshine would help it reach its true potential.

Thanks to you, our users and contributors, Atom has had an incredible year. The number of contributors has skyrocketed, and with your support, the Atom team has hurdled significant technical challenges. Every day, the editor gets better, and its performance and stability improves. Take a look at how far Atom has come:

The future

With the help of many developers around the world, Atom 1.0 is in sight. We have been rapidly knocking items off of our 1.0 feature list, and plan on releasing 1.0 next month. It's been a very exciting year, and we look forward to many more as the Atom community grows.

Last year, we exposed repository and organization metadata to help you showcase your open source efforts on GitHub Pages. We're adding releases metadata to that list, allowing you to more easily display information about your project's latest version (including release notes) and link directly to download the most recent releases.

Releases are exposed in the site.github.releases namespace within Jekyll, and contain all the information exposed through the releases API. For more information, see the Repository metadata on GitHub Pages help article.

Happy releasing!

The Organization audit log allows you to quickly review actions performed by members of your organization on GitHub. You may need to look for specific activity or even through your organization's entire audit log to help aid in legal cases or keep record of suspicious activity.

To do just that, you now have the tools to export your organization's audit log in either JSON or CSV format.

At Microsoft Build 2015, we announced deep GitHub integration in Visual Studio 2015, along with GitHub Enterprise 2.2.0. This release will help developers who work with the Microsoft stack make GitHub Enterprise a seamless part of their existing workflow. If you'd prefer to skip the summary, you can see a full list of new features in the release notes. If you're interested in the highlights, read on.

GitHub Enterprise now supported on Hyper-V and available on Microsoft Azure

It's important to be able to deploy and run GitHub Enterprise wherever you want. If your team works on the Microsoft stack, we have great news. With the 2.2.0 release, you can now host GitHub Enterprise in the Windows ecosystem using Hyper-V for local hosting or Azure for cloud hosting.

To request a 45-day trial of GitHub Enterprise on Azure just let us know.

GitHub Extension for Visual Studio

The new GitHub Extension for Visual Studio lets you work on GitHub repositories within Visual Studio 2015. Once you download the latest version of Visual Studio, you can log in to GitHub, clone and create repositories, and publish your local work without leaving your IDE. To see a walkthrough of the features, check out this video on Microsoft's Channel 9.

Microsoft Developer Assistant

In case you missed it, Microsoft also announced the availability of the Microsoft Developer Assistant for Visual Studio 2015—a way for developers to search for code on GitHub.com from Visual Studio. Just enter your query and you will see links to public code on GitHub.com, along with information about the project.

Wait, there’s more!

Beyond the Microsoft integration you’ll find lots more to like in Enterprise 2.2.0 including:

• PDF rendering
• Mobile web notifications
• Quick pull requests
• Xen hypervisor support

For a full list of what’s new, check out the release notes.

If you already use GitHub Enterprise, you can download the latest release from enterprise.github.com.

If you are attending Build 2015 and want to learn more, visit the GitHub booth on the third floor.