“GitHub? That’s a code repository, right?” said a friend, when I mentioned I was in San Francisco. GitHub Universe , the company’s annual conference, is small but perfectly formed — 1,500 delegates fills a hall but doesn’t overwhelm. And yes, developers, engineers and managers are here because they are pulling files from, and pushing to, one of the largest stores of programming code on the planet. GitHub representatives would likely dispute the “just a code repo” handle, nonetheless. I would imagine they would point at the collaboration mechanisms and team management features on the one hand, and the 30-plus million developers on the other. “It’s an ecosystem,” they might say. I haven’t asked, because the past two days’ announcements may have made the question somewhat moot. Or one announcement in particular: GitHub Actions . In a nutshell, GitHub Actions allow you to do something based on a triggering event: they can be strung together to create (say) a set of tests when code is com...