While that Mona Octocat sticker might be good for sparking conversations at the café, customizing your GitHub experience goes way beyond personalizing your profile. As a developer, you already know that where there’s code, there’s a way, but we don’t need to dive into the GitHub API to get started building a GitHub experience tailored just for you.

Whether it’s integrations with the tools you’re already using, pre-built actions you can quickly reuse and edit to automate your work, or finding just the right AI model here on GitHub to get the job done, there’s a way to make GitHub feel like home—and chances are, you’ll find it in GitHub Marketplace. 🏡

Tip #1: Integrate all your tools with GitHub apps

The first step to getting GitHub to feel like home is to connect with all the other apps you use throughout your day. One good place to start is the collection of featured GitHub integrations that quickly get you connected with tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Visual Studio, VS Code, and Jira.

But don’t stop there! There are more than 1,000 apps on GitHub Marketplace to connect with whatever other tools you use daily and to extend GitHub functionality. Apps can do things on GitHub like open issues or comment on pull requests, but also things outside GitHub based on GitHub events, like posting a message on Slack whenever an issue is opened.

And if you can’t find the right app for the job, no worries—you can build your own GitHub App, too!

Tip #2: Take advantage of pre-built actions to automate your day away 🚀

You’ve heard it before: don’t repeat yourself (DRY). Well, there are more than 20,000 actions in GitHub Marketplace just waiting to be used in your GitHub Actions workflows.

(You don’t know how to build a GitHub Actions workflow? No worries, we got you.)

Pre-built actions run the gamut from fun (turn your contribution graph into an animated snake game?) to downright handy. There are actions to help you build and push Docker images, validate and fix your code, setup your Node.js environment, and much, much more.

Heck, we built an action to enable branch deployment IssueOps at GitHub and made it available on GitHub Marketplace for you to use, and even do the same if you’d like.

What’s more, many of these actions are open source, so you can see how they work, modify them as you need, and even contribute back.

Tip #3: Customize the way you use and build with AI

Whether you're building an AI-powered application or building software with GitHub Copilot (or both at the same time!), we know that you want to choose the best model for the task.

At last month’s GitHub Universe, we added the ability to do just that with the public preview of GitHub Models and the addition of models by Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI to GitHub Copilot. Now, no matter what type of project you’re working on, you can choose the best model for your purposes, without ever leaving GitHub.

GitHub Models, for example, gives you access to dozens of AI models that you can compare side-by-side, experiment with, and build with via a playground, API, and more.

As for model choice with GitHub Copilot, GitHub Copilot Chat users will be able to choose from five different models in the coming weeks, each with its own strengths:

• OpenAI’s GPT 4o is OpenAI's most advanced multimodal model in the GPT-4 family. Can handle both text and image inputs.
• Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet excels at coding tasks across the entire software development lifecycle, from initial design to bug fixes, maintenance to optimizations. Whether you’re using it for legacy app updates or code refactoring, Claude 3.5 Sonnet demonstrates high proficiency with complex and multi-step coding tasks.
• Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, available in the coming weeks, excels at code generation, analysis, and optimization. It is natively multimodal and features a long context window of up to two million tokens—the longest of any large-scale foundation model.
• OpenAI’s o1-preview is designed with a focus on advanced reasoning and solving complex problems, including math and science tasks, giving it a deeper understanding of code constraints and edge cases.
• OpenAI’s o1-mini is smaller, faster, and 80% cheaper than o1-preview, performing well at code generation and small context operations.

Ready to make GitHub uniquely yours?

With these tips, you’re all set to transform GitHub into a fully customized workspace, tailored to your unique coding style and needs. From integrating your favorite tools with GitHub Apps to customizing your work with pre-built actions to choosing the best model for the job, you’re ready to make GitHub truly feel like home.

Get started with GitHub Marketplace

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✨ This newsletter was written by Mike Melanson and produced by Gwen Davis. ✨

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