How Coyote Logistics uses GitHub

Coyote Logistics, a third-party logistics provider based in Chicago, IL, helps shippers connect with carriers to optimize freight movement. With 345 GitHub seats, the company migrated approximately 80% of its codebase to GitHub to accelerate development and improve developer experience using GitHub's platform of tools.

Impact

• 50% approximated reduction in time to write Terraform config files with GitHub Copilot
• 50% approximated reduction in manual code reviews for cloud delivery team with GitHub Advanced Security
• 1 hour saved per Cloud Engineering developer per day with GitHub Codespaces
• 1 hour saved per day per developer with GitHub Actions


The Challenge

Technology underpins nearly everything Coyote Logistics does to deliver value to customers. The company needed to stay ahead of technology trends while providing a better developer experience and accelerating development and innovation.

The Solution

Coyote Logistics migrated repositories strategically, prioritizing projects and codebases that would gain the most value from GitHub Copilot, GitHub Actions, GitHub Codespaces, and GitHub Advanced Security. The piece-by-piece approach allowed the company to move deliberately without disrupting users overnight.

GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is already saving developers significant time. Cloud Delivery Engineer Gavin Borgeson reports that writing Terraform configurations now takes about ten minutes instead of twenty or thirty minutes, with Copilot filling in details after the base configuration is written.

Enterprise Architect Chris Taylor notes that developers who were initially skeptical quickly realized the tool makes their jobs easier and more efficient. "With GitHub Copilot, now we can code as fast as we can think," he says. By eliminating context switching between code editors and documentation lookups, developers can focus on innovation rather than less rewarding tasks like writing and debugging regular expressions.

Developers are also exploring experimental features in GitHub Copilot Labs, such as Brushes, which enables code transformation including automatic cleanup and type addition. Even non-developers are getting involved: "People who never thought they would code are now coding," Taylor says.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a massive time-saver for Coyote Logistics. Developers can build their own automations or choose from pre-approved actions with compliance policies built in, rather than engaging in lengthy back-and-forth processes with the delivery engineering team. Taylor estimates it saves the delivery team around an hour per day per developer, freeing them to focus on mission-critical CI/CD pipelines used across multiple teams.

GitHub Advanced Security and Dependabot

Borgeson's team uses GitHub Advanced Security to reduce manual code review. For repositories on GitHub, the team can flag pull requests with potential issues and automatically approve low-risk changes, resulting in up to a 50% reduction in manual reviews compared to codebases not hosted on GitHub.

Dependabot automatically generates pull requests to resolve known security issues in dependencies, providing visibility into security concerns while preventing build issues that arise from developers using different versions of the same dependency.

GitHub Codespaces

Employees across the company use Codespaces to avoid manually setting up local development environments. Software Architect Scott Atkinson notes that Codespaces provides a better management and developer experience than local development environments without requiring custom tooling investment.

"With Codespaces, we don't have to walk all of our developers through configuring a local environment for a particular application," Atkinson says. "Once it's running, you can share it and anyone in the company can use it. It's perfectly reproducible." This is particularly useful for quality assurance teams that previously spent significant time setting up environments just to run tests.

Codespaces also reduces context switching time, allowing developers to move between development environments with ease. Enterprise Architect Justin Ivins says it makes training much easier: "I don't have to make sure each person downloads a local container management solution and unzips all the right files to the right locations. They just spin up a Codespace, fire up some containers, and we can get started right away."

Atkinson no longer does local development and doesn't bring his work laptop home. "I just log in to a Codespace when I need to do something from home and make it happen," he says. "It just works. I hardly ever have to rebase anything anymore." He expects most of the company will follow his lead within six months.


Results

The piece-by-piece migration has paid off for Coyote Logistics. "The small value-add features really opened the door for our developers and increased our momentum. The potential for returns in time savings was realized very quickly," Atkinson says.

Beyond time savings, the tools have improved developer satisfaction. "Developer experience is often forgotten, so having tools like GitHub Copilot for developers has made us more excited to come to work and innovate," Taylor says. "It's brought new life and energy to our teams."