Recess! at GitHub Universe 2025
“Helping people find their people”
In the summer of 2025, I was approached to program a space on the second floor of the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco for GitHub Universe 2025. Historically, this level of the building got a little bit less traffic than other spaces, despite it being the area where all of our sponsored partners were showcasing. I was asked to design an experience that would draw attendees upstairs, facilitate attendee interactions and be high turnover enough in it’s programming to increase foot traffic.
So I created Recess!, a programmed space for attendees to make authentic and organic connections with one another beyond their digital lives. Since so much of what developers create is immaterial and ephemeral, I wanted people to experience Recess! as an opportunity to create something tangible alongside their peers. Recess! was designed to be a landing place for attendees to “touch grass,” connect with their inner sense of play, and strike up organic conversation with others about more than just their jobs.
Designing Recess!
The guiding principles for designing the space and the sessions within Recess! were to offer low-barrier-to-entry and predominantly analog activities that were fun, engaging and not skill-based. We wanted to encourage organic collaboration and conversation with intentional session variety. An added bonus was drawing new people to the space who wouldn’t necessarily rub shoulders with one another during other sessions or activities offered at Universe (i.e. an IC developer connecting with a Senior manager).
The guiding design and theme of Recess! was a “high school art room” with long tables, chairs facing one another and session materials strewn atop kraft butcher paper which would run down the center of the table to allow for spontaneous thoughts and doodles.
Over the two days of the conference, we scheduled 5-6 hour-long different sessions.
Sample Session Offerings
“You Belong with Mona” Bracelet Bash: A friendship bracelet making session at the end of the conference, including custom Octocat and Copilot ceramic beads and a Taylor Swift soundtrack
CLI (Crease Line Interface) Hour: An origami-focused session where attendees could fold pre-designed Copilot and Mona characters or a GitHub Universe-branded paper airplane
git checkout puzzles: A session dedicated to solving GitHub-branded sudoku, crossword and word search puzzles
Game Time!: Attendees could come play their favorite childhood games like Battleship, Connect Four and more with other attendees
Lunch & Link-Up: This session invited attendees to bring their own lunch and chat with others using a Table Topics format to guide conversation.
A Data-driven Retrospective on Recess!
Session data confirmed our biggest goals for Recess!, which was bringing together people across all types of job levels. Nearly all of the sessions were attended by every job level, meaning that ICs and Senior Directors were sitting side by side, connecting and collaborating in an authentic way.
Our most popular session was the “You Belong with Mona” Bracelet Bash, which was our very last session on Day 2, and still went over room capacity in our attendance and attendees stayed an extra our after the session was supposed to wrap! We had attendees of all ages, genders and job levels coming to make bracelets and keychains for themselves and their family and friends.
What People Said