It’s hard to believe that we’re already in July! The past six months at XetHub have been chock full of performance boosts, customizable views, UX updates, and more. Here’s a quick rundown of the most important work we’ve shipped, and a hint to what’s next.

Better perf with improved dedupe and automatic compression

Working with XetHub has never been faster. We’ve always optimized storage space and transfer times with our built-in block-level deduplication — now we’ve improved our dedupe algorithms and added compression to our stored blocks. The result? Huge savings (~30%) in storage space, with similar improvements to upload and download times. Keep an eye out for our official benchmarking post next week vs. Git LFS, DVC, and S3 to see what this means for real world development.

Comparing storage size across common tools for hosting the 2.45TB CORD-19 dataset.

Bring views to your repository

Ever downloaded a bunch of files just to upload them into another viewer to see what they were? 😵‍💫 Make browsing binary files easy with the newest iteration of our custom views feature, which allows you to define and scope how files are displayed with arbitrary HTML/CSS/JS or in-browser Python. Custom views are shown for both file views and pull requests, making it easy for collaborators to understand changes in context. Don’t want to build your own? Use a pre-built view from our gallery with just a single line of code!

Side-by-side comparison of two Python-generated custom views in a pull request.

Browser-based access patterns

Git isn’t for everyone. If you collaborate with artists, scientists, or others without a programming background, you know that getting someone to learn Git can be like pulling teeth. To bridge this gap, we’ve added user-friendly access patterns such as a file editing UI, drag-and-drop file uploads, and simple timeline views. Try it for yourself in our Workspace!

Demo of Workspace drag-and-drop file uploads and timeline view.

Miscellaneous

A few other quick highlights to wrap up our updates:

• 🔐 Achieved SOC2

• 🔍 File name search

• 💻 S3 read-only APIs

• 🏎️ Streamlined onboarding

• 💬 Quick feedback button

• 📊 Versioning for analytics

What’s next?

Keep an eye out for announcements on these upcoming features:

• File level notes for easy collaboration

• Line-by-line notebook diff and comment support

• Additional custom view templates for common file types

• Browser-based access patterns for our repository view

• Granular, role-based access controls at all levels of your repository

We’d love to hear what else you’d like to see in XetHub.
Join our Slack community to share your feature requests!