GitHub introduces a social network style status feature to let developers inform collaborators of their availability

Yesterday, Nat Friedman, GitHub’s CEO announced a new feature, which allows developers to share their status to coworkers know about their availability. This feature gives open source maintainers and other developers an option to inform their community that they are away and won’t respond to issues as quickly.

https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1083044980929716224

GitHub started this year with a bang by announcing updates like unlimited free private repositories (GitHub Free) and a unified enterprise offering (GitHub Enterprise). Previously, it also added a Star button using which you can indicate the topics you are interested in so GitHub can fetch the code and developers that share your interests.

You can find this feature on your GitHub profile and choose from options like On vacation, Working from home, Out sick, and Focusing. You can also set it to Busy and GitHub will inform your coworkers if they assign you any task.

Source: GitHub

Many users reacted positively to this feature update and also suggested further improvements. These are some of the suggestions:

https://twitter.com/BillHiggins/status/1083158138654736384

https://twitter.com/eamodio/status/1083056145768632325

https://twitter.com/jlnostr/status/1083045252892635136

Though many developers were excited about this feature, some of them also mentioned their concern:

https://twitter.com/timoinwien/status/1083048055849582592

https://twitter.com/simran5590/status/1083045368147767296

GitHub now provides unlimited free private repos and a new GitHub Enterprise

GitHub plans to deprecate GitHub services and move to Webhooks in 2019

GitHub was down first working day of 2019, hacker claims DDoS