In March 2021, the Mattermost server repository officially surpassed 20,000 stars on GitHub, and we couldn’t be more excited! Huge thanks to our community for their incredible support of the Mattermost open source project and their belief in the power of secure workplace messaging solutions built for developers by developers.

We’re excited to announce the release of GitHub Plugin version 2.0, which adds some new features that increase productivity and reduce the need to context switch between Mattermost and GitHub. As usual, our open source community members have played a key role in developing all of these features and I’d like to say “Thank You!” for their help. Our GitHub plugin is one of the most popular integrations on Mattermost and we use it every day as part of our development process.

On Monday, March 16, 2020, I had the privilege to (virtually) join Shota Gvinepadze and his students at the Free University of Tbilisi and speak about “Advanced Git @ Mattermost” for a portion of their class time. The following are my speaking notes from the session, slightly modified from the original slides for this format. Keep in mind that the command line examples are illustrative of my workflow, and not meant to be run in isolation.

If you want to submit good pull requests, start with our contribution checklist. Today, that page talks about what to fork, how to style your code, how to write unit tests and where to push your code. Implicit in all of that is the need to write great code, of course! But this blog post isn’t about writing great code, it’s about making your pull request a great experience for you and your reviewers.

There has never been more pressure on development teams to build software faster and more efficiently. The rise in popularity of DevOps has largely been the result of its promise to speed up dev cycles, increase agility, and help teams resolve issues more quickly. And while the availability and sophistication of DevOps tools have improved greatly in the last few years, simply choosing the latest and greatest tools is no guarantee of a smooth, problem-free development lifecycle.