GitHub Universe is Back: Take the Stage

GitHub Universe 2026 will be held on October 28–29 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Beyond just attending the event, now is the time to submit a Call for Sessions proposal. The deadline is 11:59 PM PT on May 1, and both speaking proposals and speaker recommendations are welcome.

This post revisits 5 past sessions to inspire those who want to take the stage. What they have in common is that they were all grounded in real engineering experience, yet were memorable talks delivered with storytelling, humor, and a strong point of view.

• Git's nine lives: Compared a frontend team's Git chaos to a cat's nine lives, unpacking hidden features like sparse checkouts, partial clones, and reflog recovery.
• Breath of Copilot: Unpacked CI/CD and security like a fantasy quest, showing patterns for using GitHub Actions and GitHub Advanced Security more safely.
• Dream it in the morning, build it in the afternoon: Covered the flow of turning ideas into prototypes and products faster, emphasizing a developer's mindset of continuous experimentation.
• Dungeons and deployments: Unpacked Kubernetes security training in a role-playing format, making complex concepts easy to understand.
• Mission Copilot Autofix: Showed how AI helps with interpreting security alerts and making fixes, and looked ahead to the possibilities for automating defense going forward.

This year's session formats come in three types. Demo-style sessions are suited to product demos and Ship & Tell; Thought leadership fits longer narratives and Q&A like Breakout Sessions, Panels, and Fireside chats; and Interactive learning aims for participatory learning like Workshops and Sandbox sessions.

In particular, the new format Ship & Tell is great for startup founders and builders to share what they built, how they scaled it, what broke, and what worked. Ultimately, what Universe is looking for are proposals that combine real engineering lessons with personality and creativity.