The GitHub Podcast

Cassidy and GPS welcome GitHub VP of Developer Relations (and original GitHub Podcast host) Martin Woodward. Martin reflects on attending every Universe since its earliest days, then digs into what he calls one of the trickiest open problems facing GitHub right now: as AI makes it dramatically easier to generate a pull request, open source maintainers are being flooded with well-meaning but low-effort contributions. He also goes deep on this year’s Universe conference badge, now with an accelerometer that auto-flips the screen, capacitive PCB game controls, and a Copilot agent that can write and deploy MicroPython apps straight to the badge from a single prompt. Martin shares his advice for staying curious and giving yourself “permission to play” in a career that spans multiple tech epochs, and why he thinks the fundamentals worth learning now are less about which language you pick and more about systems thinking. They wrap with three open source picks: ZoomIt for Mac, prek, and Martin’s own Halloween-ready PumpkinPi and IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD lamp hack.

Links mentioned in the episode:

GitHub Universe
Learn to Cloud
Pimoroni Tufty badge
ZoomIt for Mac
prek
PumpkinPi
IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD ESP32 hack

The GitHub Podcast is produced and edited by editaudio.

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Cassidy and Andrea are joined by Sameen Karim, Senior Product Manager at GitHub, to dig into stacked pull requests, GitHub's newly launched (and long-requested) way to break large changes into a linked chain of small, reviewable PRs. Sameen pulls back the curtain on just how deep this went: every time a PR updates, GitHub runs a live "ghost merge" simulation behind the scenes to check whether it's mergeable, and stacking meant multiplying that complexity across up to 100 linked PRs at once. The team had to rethink core assumptions about how a PR's base branch relates to its actual merge target, rewrite parts of the merge box that hadn't been touched in over a decade, build an entirely new asynchronous merge path, and close a code owners loophole that could otherwise let people sneak changes past review. Sameen also talks about "agent-driven testing," where GitHub ran swarms of agents around the clock trying to break the feature, how teams like Vercel, Nuxt, and the React team are already adopting stacks, and what's next: support for stacks across forks. The episode closes with three open source picks: Sarah Drasner's visual code explainers, the AGENTS.md standard, and the open source gh-stack CLI Sameen built (and rewrote in Go) to manage stacks locally.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• GitHub Universe
• Sarah Drasner's code drawings
• AGENTS.md
• gh-stack CLI

The GitHub Podcast is produced and edited by editaudio.

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Cassidy and GPS are joined by Camilla Moraes, a product manager on GitHub's Maintainer Love (aka Tiny Wins) team, to talk about how the team finds and ships small, high-impact fixes for open source maintainers. Camilla walks through her path from engineering to product, and shares how the team's focus shifted this year from quick two-to-three-week "paper cuts" to a bigger, all-hands problem: the rise of low-quality, AI-generated contributions flooding repos. Camilla gives some insight into a new tool the Tiny Wins team has designed to address that issue: PR limits, which lets maintainers cap how many open PRs a user without write access can have at once. The group also talks through how the team prioritizes an endless stream of feedback from Slack, socials, and surveys, and how Camilla built her own repo-as-a-database system with Copilot to track it all. They close out with three open source picks: iOpenPod, Bento, and Camilla's own vibe-coded project for rating the health of a GitHub repo.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Maintainer Community
• iOpenPod
• Bento

The GitHub Podcast is produced and edited by editaudio.

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Cassidy and GPS dive into a round of AI hot takes to separate the extreme, engagement-bait opinions from the actual nuance. They debate whether developers still need to read AI-generated code, why “jobs won't hire you if you don't use AI” is more complicated than it sounds, and GPS's own hot take against the newest wave of paid coding bootcamps. From there they tackle whether skills have killed MCP, whether RAG is dead, and a borrowed hot take from their boss Martin: if you have to fine-tune a model to your code base, your code is bad. They close out with two open source picks: Pollinations AI, a generative AI platform experimenting with earning credits through code contributions, and Avian Visitors, a beautifully documented build log of a bird-listening e-ink display.

Links mentioned in the episode:

Pollinations AI
Avian Visitors

The GitHub Podcast is produced and edited by editaudio.

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In today’s episode, Cassidy, Marlene, and GPS tackle the ever-growing pile of new AI and agent terminology that's popped up seemingly overnight. They break down loop engineering (designing systems that prompt your agents instead of prompting them yourself), the Ralph loop that helped popularize it, and how squads and fleets let multiple agents split up planning, testing, and review work in parallel. They also dig into harness engineering (the scaffolding around a model that turns raw text generation into something useful), the newly coined “hill climbing,” and why forward deployed engineer might just be a solutions architect with better AI tooling. They wrap with a look at the spectrum between closed, open weight, and open source models, plus each host's open source pick of the week: Astro 7, the RAE API project, and Tau.

Links mentioned in the episode:

Loop Engineering by Addy Osmani
Ralph Wiggum as a "software engineer"
MCP
LangChain
Astro 7
RAE API
Tau

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The GitHub Podcast is back for Season 2! In the season opener, Cassidy Williams is joined by co-hosts Marlene Mhangami and GPS Peña-Siguenza. The trio revisits their favorite moments from Season 1, including Keeley Hammond's take on Electron and why “bloated JavaScript” hot takes don't hold up, Angie Jones's conversation on MCP and Goose, and the Tiny Wins team's work fixing the everyday "paper cuts" that make life easier for open source maintainers. From there, the hosts dig into their own winding paths into tech. GPS’ shares her journey from sysadmin to .NET and Cloud Advocacy to building a free open source platform that teaches cloud fundamentals (now used by nearly 7,000 people). Marlene traces her path from studying molecular biology to becoming a fixture in the Python community, and her early open source work on CuDF at NVIDIA, advocating for Ibis at Voltron Data, then starting the LangChain Azure repository at Microsoft. Cassidy rounds out the episode with insights to her front-end and React roots and her early days making tech memes on TikTok. Finally, each host shares an open source pick of the week: Mediabunny, Handy, and Cua.

The hosts' favorite episodes from last season:

Tiny Wins, Big Impact: Accessibility, MCP, and the Future of Open Source at GitHub

LIVE from GitHub Universe: Angie Jones on Goose, MCP, and the Real-World Future of AI Agents

Making Desktop Frameworks More Accessible with Electron

Other links mentioned in the episode:

Electron

MCP

Goose

Learn to Cloud

CUDF

Ibis

Langchain Azure

Mediabunny

Handy

https://github.com/trycua/cua

CUA

The GitHub Podcast is produced and edited by editaudio.

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In this year-in-review episode of The GitHub Podcast, Cassidy and Abby are joined by Helen Hou-Sandí, GitHub’s engineering manager for the Accessibility Engineering team and lead developer in the WordPress project.

They dig into Maintainer Tiny Wins, a series of two week long timeboxed improvements that save millions of developer minutes a day, from smarter PR reviewers panels and one-click merge conflict resolution to long-awaited WebP support. Helen shares how accessibility issues often spark broader UX improvements, and why fixing “just” a border color can evolve into deeply impactful changes at GitHub’s scale. They also explore the rise of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as an open standard, GitHub’s new open source accessibility scanner action, supporting non-code contributors and AI as the “over-eager new contributor.

Whether you’re a maintainer, a contributor, or just love a good Furby-powered keynote, this episode is a love letter to the tiny details that make open source better for everyone.

Links mentioned in the episode:

GitHub Accessibility Scanner Action

Project Bluefin

GitHub Universe 2025 – Day Two Keynote

Unlocking the Power of MCP

2025 Octoverse Report

Refined GitHub Browser Extension

Git History Cleaner

Open Source Accessibility Summit

The GitHub Podcast is produced and edited by editaudio.

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In this episode guest host Greg Cochran from the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund brings together four maintainers who are helping secure the open source projects we all depend on: Christian (Log4j/Log4Shell), Carlos (GoReleaser), Michael (EVCC), and Camila (ScanAPI) to unpack what it really looks like to level up security in critical OSS.

They share how the Fund’s three-week security sprint, ongoing check-ins, and tight-knit community helped them move from “we don’t know what we don’t know” to concrete wins: hardened GitHub Actions pipelines, incident response plans, better reporting processes, and SBOMs that actually include dependency licenses. They also talk candidly about asking “dumb” questions in a trusted space and the ripple effect when one project’s security posture improves across its dependents. Finally, the group dives into AI security: using fuzzing, GitHub Copilot, and tools like the Secure Code Game both to find vulnerabilities faster and to keep up with attackers who now have AI on their side too.

Links mentioned in the episode: 

GitHub Secure Open Source Fund overview

Announcing GitHub Secure Open Source Fund

Inside the breach that broke the internet: The untold story of Log4Shell

Log4j / Log4Shell video (castle interview with Christian)

EVCC – open source EV charging & energy management 

GoReleaser – release engineering automation

ScanAPI – automated API testing & live documentation

GitHub Security Lab

Secure Code Game (GitHub Security Lab)

GitHub Copilot – AI coding assistant

The GitHub Podcast is produced and edited by editaudio.

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Abby sits down with Angie Jones, VP of Engineering at Block, live at GitHub Universe to talk about Goose, Block’s open source AI agent and reference implementation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Angie shares how Goose went from an internal tool to an open source project that lets the community drive features like multimodel support, and how Block’s 12,000 employees across 15+ job functions (not just engineers) now use agents every day. They dig into practical, non-hype uses of AI agents: detecting when students are struggling, triaging open source issues, segmenting 80k+ sales leads, and even letting a salesperson “vibe code” a feature on the train. Angie also talks about trust and control when giving AI access to codebases, why developers are tired of flashy demos, and how her new AI Builder Fellowship is designed to support the next generation of native AI builders. 

Links mentioned in the episode: 

https://angiejones.tech

https://github.com/block/goose

https://github.com/block

https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol

https://github.com/features/copilot

https://testautomationu.applitools.com

https://www.selenium.dev

https://playwright.dev

https://www.cypress.io

https://code.visualstudio.com

https://www.salesforce.com

https://github.com/martinwoodward/pyfluff

The GitHub Podcast is produced and edited by editaudio.

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In this episode, recorded live at GitHub Universe 2025, Andrea sits down with Frank “Frenck” Nijhof, a GitHub Star and project lead for Home Assistant, one of the most active open source projects on the platform. They unpack how millions of households run privacy-first automations locally (no cloud required), why the Open Home Foundation exists to prevent vendor lock-in and e-waste, and how this famously welcoming community scaled to 21k+ contributors. Frank also shares insights about the development of “Assist,” an open, local-first voice assistant (with optional AI), as well as the new “Home Assist Green” hardware device, plus practical ways non-coders can meaningfully contribute to the project, too.

Links mentioned in the episode:

https://github.com/frenck

https://www.home-assistant.io

https://www.home-assistant.io/green

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice

https://www.home-assistant.io/assist

https://www.esphome.io

https://github.com/home-assistant

https://www.raspberrypi.com

The GitHub Podcast is produced and edited by editaudio.

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