Oh yessss first!
I’ve literally just shared toot and tweet saying how slow I am, but here I am first again! 
FYI that was about a mega realisation I had today - how staggeringly big a deal Safe Network is going to be for developers (here).
Bad luck @MaidSafe but thanks to @Josh I’m in a win-win situation and ready to cash out 
The news that a testnet is imminent, and might have rewards 
is brilliant too. As always, thank you MaidSafe team even though you were trying to make me lose the bet with @Josh. Every incentive helps! 
It’s also awesome to have PRs rolling in from the community. This lifts my spirits and I expect it is great for the team to see too. It is such an important part of the project, so I can imagine David grinning. Thank you @bzee, @mav and @scorch. I think @folaht is doing great work too poking around with running local networks, getting IPv6 working and understanding where the code is at. 
Mini Git Portal Update (4th Feb 2021)
Three really nice things have been added or enhanced:
- automated tests
- continuous integration on github
- improve generation of documentation (for internal APIs)
- all the above updated in the README
Development and Production Testing
I mentioned previously that I had set up a test framework, but now I’ve supercharged it. What I had was the basics, but now I have it firing up two servers so the tests can run fully automatically.
One server is for the app, which can either be run on a new build (for production testing) or using webpack-dev-middleware for hot reloading during development. 
The second server is a trivial githttp server stolen from wasm-git (which I worked on recently - and had a PR accepted! - while evaluating options for Git Portal). That means I can create more complex internal tests without using a proxy if I want, though the latter will also be an option during development.
It alls sounds a bit geeky to non-developers, but its a big plus for the project and I’m chuffed because I’ve never done any of those things before. All I have to do now is write the tests! And it will make it much easier for others to jump in and help out.
Continuous Integration on GitHub
Encouraged by @StephenC (thanks for offering to help but I managed with a little trial and error) the production tests mentioned above are now run automatically by GitHub whenever code is pushed to main or a PR is submitted. And all tests currently pass!
I’m chuffed as it’s the first time I’ve set up continuous integration on one of my projects and a useful feature that makes it much easier to collaborate with others…so more PRs please!
Improved Documentation Generation (for internal APIs)
To help folks contribute and make the project easier to maintain I wanted the APIs used by the front-end to communicate with the application-logic to be documented as well as tested, and had a basic set-up in place (from the previous update).
But to make it useable I had to do some more tweaking and ended up writing my first JSDoc plugin. It’s simple, but also a new skill that means I can do much more with this when needed.
The main change this time is to shorten the symbol names. Previously JSDoc was prefixing everything with “export.” which was making the menus unusable, and generally polluting the documentation with useless information.
I also learned a bit more about how to use JSDoc and will at some point be writing some guidelines to make it easier for others to jump in and help so…
Help Welcome!
I’m only one person, and a slow one at that 
, trying to create a GitHub alternative and even though there are lots of economies doing this on Safe Network (see below), I won’t be able to complete this all on my own.
So if you want to contribute in any way, don’t be shy. Testing always helps, following the README and finding things that don’t work is invaluable and of course there is code to write in Rust or JavaScript, Svelte stuff to do, front-end UI to envision and build, new post-GitHub features to imagine and much more. All are welcome and I’ll help you skill up wherever you fancy trying something new.
And it is all built on exciting new technology such as [cough] Safe, Rust/WASM, WasmerJS/WASI, my old favourite Svelte and the fancy automated testing and CI I described above.
This is fun, and an exciting valuable project to work on.