GitHub’s top blogs of 2024

As 2024 wraps up, we’re revisiting the highlights of a year packed with innovation, learning, and community. From unlocking the power of AI to mastering essential developer tools, these blogs reflect what makes GitHub the home for all developers. Ready? Let’s jump in.

Choose your own adventure with AI models

GitHub Copilot has long leveraged different large language models (LLMs) for different use cases. Now, you can access these models to meet your own needs.

• Take a first look at OpenAI o1 in GitHub Copilot to see where it can add value to your day to day.
• Experiment with OpenAI o1-preview and o1-mini.
• Access Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s o1-preview across many of GitHub Copilot’s surface areas and functions.

And by the way, this is now available to you for free.

New from GitHub

2024 was all about empowering you to ship better code faster and smarter. Here are the launches that had the community buzzing:

• Try GitHub Models. We believe every developer (that’s you!) can be an AI engineer with the right tools and training. Access a number of AI models via a built-in playground that lets you test different prompts and model parameters, for free, right in GitHub. If you like what you’re seeing on the playground, you can easily bring the models to your developer environment in GitHub Codespaces and VS Code and start building.
• Unlock more possibilities with GitHub Copilot Extensions. Through a growing partner ecosystem, Copilot Extensions helps you use GitHub Copilot across third-party tools, services, and more (plus you can build your own!), all without leaving the IDE or GitHub.com.
• Work smarter with GitHub Copilot Enterprise. Our most advanced AI offering to date is customized to your organization’s knowledge and codebase, infusing GitHub Copilot throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Meet GitHub Copilot Workspace, the Copilot-native developer environment where any developer can go from idea to code to software, all in natural language. Sign up for the waitlist today, and we’ll email you when it’s your turn to try Copilot Workspace.
• Secure code more than three times faster with Copilot Autofix. Our vision for application security is a world where a vulnerability found means a vulnerability fixed. Copilot Autofix now includes security campaigns to help you remediate vulnerabilities at scale and pay down years of security debt with just a few clicks.
• Power faster, more efficient build systems thanks to Arm64 on GitHub Actions. This new addition to our suite of hosted runners provides power, performance, and sustainability improvements for all your GitHub Actions jobs. You can take advantage of Arm-based hardware hosted by GitHub to build and deploy your release assets anywhere Arm architecture is used.

Level up your skills

Keeping up with the always-changing technology landscape requires you to be a lifelong learner. Whether you’re looking to go deep in your current skillset or expand your knowledge to prepare for that next career move, we have resources to help you get there.

Git essentials

• Start with the fundamentals with our beginner’s guide to version control.
• Master the top 12 Git commands every developer must know.
• Showcase your new skills with a GitHub Certification!

AI for everyone

• Take a look behind the scenes at how AI code generation works.
• Learn tips, tricks, and best practices for using GitHub Copilot in your IDE.
• Think outside the box with 10 unexpected ways to use GitHub Copilot.
• Add a new language to your toolbox with AI coding tools.

The state of open source

The global developer community surged in size in 2024. (Did you know there are now 150M developers on GitHub?!) The Octoverse report highlighted the boom in data science and machine learning: Python overtook JavaScript as the most popular language on GitHub for the first time, and the use of Jupyter Notebooks skyrocketed.

Find out how your favorite tools fared and explore the hottest projects welcoming new contributors. Read the report.

Stay connected

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Written by

Laura Lindeman

@lclindeman