Welcome to another episode of The Download! This week, we cover the general availability of the GitHub Copilot app, which now supports free and education plans alongside the bring your own key feature. We also dive into the new GitHub issue fields that let you track structured metadata across your repositories. Plus, we explore the latest JavaScript methods and the brand-new HTTP query method. Check the links below to learn more about GitHub Universe happening this October.
Correction: GitHub Universe will happen on October 28th - 29th 2026.
#DevNews #GitHubCopilot #GitHubUniverse
— CHAPTERS —
0:00 Welcome to the Download 0:32 GitHub Copilot app updates 0:56 GitHub issue fields are generally available 1:29 GitHub Universe is coming to San Francisco 1:53 New JavaScript methods in ECMAScript 2:26 The new HTTP query method 3:14 Wrapping up
About GitHub It’s where over 180 million developers create, share, and ship the best code possible. It’s a place for anyone, from anywhere, to build anything—it’s where the world builds software. https://github.com
Discover the hidden power of GitHub Copilot's canvases — custom, interactive sidebars that transform how you work with agents. I walk through building a personal hub that tracks repos, open PRs, deployments and lets you spin up two‑way agent sessions to refine specs, run triage, or fire off GitHub Actions. He demos repo-action dashboards, a Tiny Tool Town submitter that parses READMEs and submits tools, and the Focus Plan for picking prioritized work or assigning tasks to cloud agents.
Most useful: you can create a canvas in minutes with a single "create canvas" prompt, scope it to user/project/session, share it via Awesome Copilot or a gist, and automate routine dev tasks. If you want faster triage, repeatable workflows, and playful community-made tools, this episode is a hands-on guide to rethinking your dev workflow with canvases.
Disclaimer: This channel, videos, and streams are created in my spare time and are a product of me... James Montemagno! They are NOT officially affiliated or endorsed by Microsoft (my employer) in any way. Opinions and views are my own.
What is on my hat? It is the CLE clothing logo because I am from Cleveland! Checkout their awesome CLE merch: https://cleclothingco.myshopify.com/
How can you improve your LLM agent systems through specification enrichment? What are the advantages of having an LLM act as a judge within an agent system? This week on the show, Senior IEEE Member and Quality Engineer Suneet Malhotra joins us to discuss building and evaluating agentic architecture.
Suneet Malhotra is an independent practitioner-researcher with 18 years of experience in Quality Engineering (QE) and test automation for consumer-scale platforms. He discusses building specification-enrichment loops, monitoring performance, and using Cohen’s kappa to measure agreement between LLM judgments.
Suneet is currently publishing multiple papers that are under peer review on these topics. He also provides links to his work and GitHub projects if you want to experiment with these concepts and methods yourself.
“If the net result is that all the teens in Australia are still using social media, even after they’re technically banned from doing it, why are we doing any of this?”
Aliu Adewale: The Over-Communicator vs. The Over-Ambitious—Two Patterns Every Scrum Master Should Recognize
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
The Great Product Owner: The Over-Communicator Who Negotiated Every Scope Change
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"This is a guy who over-communicates everything." - Aliu Adewale
The best Product Owner Aliu ever worked with did something simple that almost no PO does. Before each refinement, he'd pull up the Jira board, record himself walking through every user story, explaining acceptance criteria, talking through the end goal one ticket at a time—and post the video to the team a day or two ahead. This was before Loom existed. The result: refinement felt less like discovery and more like "walking it back"—the team arrived already prepared, with real questions, ready to engage. He still attended every refinement and never missed a comment in Jira. But the second skill Aliu names matters even more: negotiation. This PO never let scope creep into a sprint mid-stride without consulting the team first. "If we add these two requests from leadership, what's the impact? Do we need to take something out?" And if the team said no, he didn't force it. He went back to leadership and named the consequence: "If we add this, here's what happens. Are you okay with that?" Over-communication and negotiation—two skills that protect the team and the product at the same time.
Self-reflection Question: When was the last time your PO asked the team's permission before adding work mid-sprint?
The Bad Product Owner: The Over-Ambitious PO Who Never Said No
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
"Every yes to something unimportant is a no to what matters." - Aliu Adewale
The Product Owner Aliu names as the anti-pattern is the over-ambitious PO—the one who never says no. Never to stakeholders, never to the business, never to a new feature request. He never considered the size of the team or the capacity of the team. He was blind to it. Underneath the behavior, Aliu sees a pattern: POs who want to keep their job by saying yes, stakeholders who keep asking because they think they have to, and a team on probation that doesn't feel safe pushing back. The damage compounds—more features delivered, less value per feature, and eventually the team itself starts to break. Aliu's framing is sharp: "More features don't equal more value. Sometimes more is just less." The job of the Scrum Master here is to coach the PO on when to say no, when to say yes, and how to recognize that on the phone in front of you right now, 90% of the features in that app you're staring at—you never use them. Built. Shipped. Ignored.
In this segment, we refer to Product Owner anti-patterns and the courage required to challenge stakeholder demands.
Self-reflection Question: Is your PO measuring success by features shipped, or by features used?
[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥
Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.
🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.
Aliu is an Agile Delivery Lead with over 10 years of experience empowering teams to unlock their potential and deliver meaningful value. As an author, Aliu simplifies Agile principles through real-life experiences, providing practical insights for professionals to apply Agile methodologies effectively in work and everyday life.
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