All over the world people are doing incredible things with code. Technology companies, like Google, continue to play a key role in these innovations by providing developers the tools that they need. Google’s Developer Marketing team wanted to find new ways to encourage developers to use Google’s technologies and push the boundaries of what is possible with code.

Today, developers are using code in more artistic and creative ways - challenging what code can be, and what art can be. We set out to reframe coding as a creative discipline, and hero these progressive developers as artists and the work that they do as art.

It was essential for us to adopt the natural behaviour of our developer audience, and tailor the experience to their existing workflow. By encouraging developers to document their projects openly we could leverage the process as a means to educate and inspire other developers.

We innovated by seamlessly integrating GitHub, an open source platform for the development of code (essentially the developers’ art canvas) to the front end of the website. Any developments in GitHub would automatically update in the DevArt gallery for all to see.

DevArt provides a real-time platform for visualizing the process of code development and documentation. We designed the experience to integrate with the existing way developers work. Users can update their content without diverging from normal activities and see in real-time how their project would look on DevArt via normal commit operations used while coding. We did this by fully integrating the DevArt platform with GitHub, the most diffused versioning tool on the Internet.

Such deep integration with GitHub has never-been-done before to power a real-time global publishing platform that documents processes behind the creation of work.

When a user connects to DevArt, the GitHub authentication process allows the backend to store an OAuth token that then performs requests on behalf of that user: the access token is used to create a webhook on the user’s repository allowing DevArt to receive push notifications. Another asynchronous process running as a cron job constantly monitors all the repositories linked to DevArt database and updates webhooks or deletes content from the local database if the fork has been removed from GitHub.

If any content related to DevArt’s frontend is updated on the user’s repo, a push notification triggers a process on AppEngine that connects to GitHub, downloading relevant content and storing it to the database for moderation.

DevArt’s backend has been developed in Python and runs on Google AppEngine using webapp2 and ndb for data models. The content update system relies on a custom implementation of the GitHub API, the moderation panel is implemented using Google+ authentication with custom roles management and uses AngularJS and Bootstrap for end user visualization. The frontend heavily relies on AngularJS for its intrinsic MVC architecture, and uses a set of additional libraries and pre-processors, including: Grunt, Sass, TweenLite, RequestAnimationFrame, Lo-Dash, SignalsJS, RequireJS (AlmondJS), Modernizr.

We launched the DevArt platform in February, pre-populated with a collection of some of the world’s best digital art, and featured 3 newly commissioned works for the forthcoming DevArt exhibition to open this summer at the London Barbican, and touring for a further 5 years.

The project captured the imagination of developers and within the first 24hrs became GitHub’s 4th most popular repository, out of 6 million. To date the site has been visitors by over 1.1 million visitors from all over the world and a series of global hackathons inspired and engaged local communities of developers to enter the competition.

As a first-of-it’s-kind competition, where developers shared every part of their process we pushed the boundaries of a conventional competition.

We’ll also be running a ‘Young Creators programme’, for 9-13 year olds, to inspire the next generation to take their first steps in coding and expressing their creativity.

The site lives on and will remain as an inspiration hub and a channel for open source creative applications of code, continuing to play an active role to inspire, educate, communicate and generate advocacy around the creative possibilities of modern technologies and tools.