Before I introduce myself, I first want to highlight a monumental day in our company’s story. Today, we begin writing a new chapter under a new company name. We’ve decided to name the entire company after our flagship product, the ultra-popular GitKraken Client. Why make this move now? It’s much more than a cosmetic name change. Today ushers in the next phase in our evolution – one in which we will become the premier provider of Git tools for developers around the world.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Eric Amodio, creator of GitLens. I’m an innovator, leader, architect, and seasoned full-stack developer. I started developing GitLens way back in 2016 when I fell in love with Visual Studio Code and wanted to play with what was then newly released extension support. It all started with a simple question: could I add Git insights via CodeLens (hence GitLens) to any document? Which of course was yes, and a whole lot more.

If you’ve been building client websites for a while, you may remember a time before WordPress. A time when building websites meant creating every HTML page by hand. At some point, you probably decided that there were common features that every customer needed on their site, so you started using one customer’s website as the template for the next. Of course these days, WordPress is the underlying software for many modern websites, and there’s no need to re-invent core functionality.

If you’re writing or tracking code for a project you’ve likely heard of Version Control Systems, or VCS, also commonly referred to as source control. The primary function of a Version Control System is to host a project and track how it develops over time. With a VCS, developers can compare changes in files, track commits, propose changes, view project history, revert to old versions of the project, and more.

You groan. Perhaps not audibly, but your eyes widen and then slowly shut with dread. After a lucky streak of merging feature branches without incident, you finally hit a Git merge conflict. Unsure of where to start, you sheepishly bring up Slack and direct message a plea for help. Maybe this has been you, or maybe you’ve just seen it happen. Either way, it means spending time untangling the code by yourself, or with the sympathetic assistance of another.

At GitKraken, we know every developer wants to focus on delivering the best projects. Spending time and energy switching between tools, or struggling to keep focus when digging through code, are things we would all love to minimize. This is precisely what has driven us to introduce the unbelievable new set of features in the GitKraken v8.0 release! Download the most powerful version of GitKraken ever, for free! Download GitKraken Windows / Mac / Linux.

As part of GitKraken’s ongoing mission to make software developers and Agile DevOps teams more productive using Git, we are excited to announce today that we are bringing another Git collaboration tool into the Kraken family: Git Integration for Jira by BigBrassBand. With over 3.6 million users in 10,000 companies, Git Integration for Jira is the most popular paid Atlassian Marketplace app for integrating Git and Jira DevOps workflows.

This article was written by a guest author. Not long ago, if we wanted to put our code into production, we needed to manually configure a server, our infrastructure, that would host our app or database. This manual process is not only time-consuming, but also prone to errors. That is why at present, developers chose to create “scripts” that are in charge of configuring the infrastructure These “scripts” are known as Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

In today’s world of software development, one of the most emphasized practices is CI, or Continuous Integration. Continuous Integration is the first step of the CI/CD pipeline and acts as an enabler for the whole DevOps mindset and methodology. CI is the foundation of modern software development. Given the fact that this is the first stage of a proper DevOps setup, it’s crucial that it must be done correctly.

Code review is a process to ensure that bugs and errors are caught and fixed before they reach production. This very often requires the participation of developers who are not directly involved in implementing the particular part of code that is being reviewed. Code review is part of a bigger quality assurance process to ensure that the final product performs exactly as expected.