Whether it’s a desktop, a server, a piece of network gear, or telecommunications equipment, if it has a silicon chip, Intel likely designed the hardware and software that powers it. “Wherever you look, Intel is there. It’s like we are water, touching everything across the ecosystem without many developers even realizing it,” says Arun Gupta, Vice President and General Manager for Open Ecosystem at Intel. “Whether they’re running code on their own machine, in the cloud, or at the edge, our technology is bringing it to life.”

With such an expansive reach, each Intel developer organization honed their solutions around their customers’ needs leading to optimized point solutions, sometimes without capitalizing on finding possible synergies through increased visibility of code and projects across the company. Two teams might gain similar insights and recognize more quickly, sharing and building collaborative solutions to benefit all teams and customer bases with a more unified approach. Over the past three years, Intel has promoted a much more unified approach with its 1Source initiative and team, moving its source code from multiple locations onto a single platform with GitHub Enterprise. Intel development teams that span the globe now view and share code and collaborate on projects much more easily, enabling Intel to realize more synergies to benefit its customers.

“By moving our code base to GitHub, we've broken down barriers,” says Intel software engineering director David Florey, who leads the 1Source team. “Having a single source control system is absolutely essential to enable developers to share, learn, and collaborate across the entire organization.”

By moving our code base to GitHub, we've broken down barriers.

Now, Intel’s 1Source initiative is home to the company’s GitHub deployment, hosting four GitHub organizations that are maintained by the 1Source team, each with a unique source code governance model. The primary organization, Intel-innersource, houses the vast majority of Intel’s nearly 100,000 repositories and is set up to offer broad access for all of its developers. With all of Intel’s developers going to one place for source code, the company has ushered in an innersource culture, which is the practice of bringing open source principles and best practices inside an organization to drive increased collaboration across teams. For Intel, the innersource approach has meant something as simple as having a unified method for naming repositories—a convention the 1Source team has been promoting across the company. By transitioning to a hierarchical naming scheme that is specific to an application or firmware, Intel has boosted code reuse and enabled its developers to collaborate more effectively.

“Moving toward standardized repository naming convention has helped us leverage our assets much more efficiently,” says Florey. “Naming repositories based on function or capability, rather than by project or group or filled with acronyms, helps teams more easily recognize how they can be reused.”

At the same time, Intel is using strategies like polling to collect feedback, building bespoke onboarding programs, and frequently socializing the value of innersource to empower its developers to deliver better end products.

“We are software first. Having a silicon chip with a feature not enabled by software is a bug,” explains Gupta. “To operate at scale, we need to streamline our engineering practices and make it easier to collaborate.”

In many ways, an innersource culture is simply adopting what Intel’s developers have done in the open source realm for years. The company contributes to more than 700 open source standards and bodies, such as open source packages like OpenJDK, LLVM, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Linux, and Kubernetes, where Intel has been among the top 10 contributors since the beginning. Not only are the vast majority of these projects deeply rooted in GitHub, which means Intel’s developers are already familiar with GitHub’s features and workflows, but Gupta also sees the company’s involvement in them as a two-way street.

“Contributing to open source shows the developer community that we are committed to helping make open source successful,” says Gupta.

Intel has also worked to standardize its approach to securing software with GitHub Advanced Security and Dependabot. These tools not only help admins set organizational features that maintain consistency and help ensure codebases are kept safe, but also shift security left to help developers catch mistakes before they happen and learn in real time. By catching vulnerabilities before they’re ever even committed, GitHub increases Intel’s developer velocity, enabling Intel to remain focused on innovating.

The integration of GitHub’s secret scanning and push protection directly in a developer’s flow saves time and helps educate developers on best practices.

“If I attempt to push a secret, I immediately know it,” says Florey. “GitHub’s secret scanning push protection stops me before a secret is pushed into the code base, saving me tons of time. If instead I rely solely on external scanning tools to scan the repository after the secret’s already been exposed, I’ll need to quickly revoke the secret and refactor my code. The integration of GitHub’s secret scanning and push protection directly in a developer’s flow saves time and helps educate developers on best practices.”

Alongside GitHub Advanced Security’s secret scanning features, Dependabot provides visibility into the state of dependencies in Intel’s repositories, automatically creating pull requests to update outdated dependencies. And on the open source side of its business, Intel sees GitHub as a key ally in its open source security posture, which benefits the open source community at large.

Intel has also been working to promote automation more widely with GitHub Actions. Currently, the company uses custom self-hosted runners to help validate the inventory of its 1Source repository, which serves to catalog all of the company’s other repositories on GitHub, but Florey says that the company plans to use Actions more heavily to improve its CI/CD pipelines.

In the end, Florey says that the relationship between GitHub and Intel’s engineering organizations has helped them to grow and scale their software development operations.

We have been able to scale collaboration and security so quickly because we moved the 1Source initiative onto GitHub.

“We're trying to do much more with GitHub, and you all are leaning in and saying, ‘All right, how can we help?’ and it has been fantastic. I've worked with a lot of vendors in the past and this has by far been the best experience,” says Florey. “We have been able to scale collaboration and security so quickly because we moved the 1Source initiative onto GitHub.”