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E-commerce hasn't just made it easier for consumers to shop from home; it has democratized commerce. Gone are the days when you needed access to a physical space to sell products. Now, with companies like Mercado Libre, anyone can list products online and sell them to people around the world. As the largest e-commerce and digital payments ecosystem in Latin America, Mercado Libre is one of the driving forces behind this revolution, but the company overcame many early obstacles to get to this point.

"E-commerce in Latin America faces a number of particular challenges," says SVP of Technology Sebastian Barrios. "For example, both internet connectivity and package delivery can be issues in rural areas. We have to be very creative to solve these problems." Many potential customers also lacked bank accounts or credit cards, which led to the creation of Mercado Pago, an application that enabled people to make online purchases, send money to friends and family, and even make digital payments for in-store transactions.

Technology has been a part of everything Mercado Libre has done since the beginning, from building customer-facing products to managing human resources internally. To keep its more than 10,000 developers laser-focused on building new features that serve users and help the company fulfill its mission, Mercado Libre standardized on GitHub Enterprise as its development platform.  

GitHub is at the heart of every aspect of software development at Mercado Libre, with everyone from developers to product managers to designers using the platform to collaborate. Senior Technical Director Lucia Brizuela credits GitHub's user interface and ease of integration for turbo-charging the company's speed to market without overburdening the DevOps team. Mercado Libre's developers merge and deploy about 100,000 pull requests per day, keeping the company’s apps ahead of the competition. "GitHub enables us to be more collaborative, move faster, and focus more on building new features that improve our customers' lives," says Brizuela.

For example, the company was able to quickly roll out a facial recognition system for Mercado Pago so users can log in securely without the need for passwords.

We see GitHub's platform continually evolving with new features that are super helpful. The clear winner recently has been GitHub Copilot, where we've seen amazing results from the trials we've been running with our teams.

The Mercado Libre team is constantly on the lookout for new tools to help them innovate. "We see GitHub's platform continually evolving with new features that are super helpful," Barrios says. "The clear winner recently has been GitHub Copilot, where we've seen amazing results from the trials we've been running with our teams."

Mercado Libre has made GitHub Copilot available to its entire developer organization, and it’s already improving satisfaction and productivity among teams, empowering them to focus more on valuable and satisfying work while automating away repetitive or less engaging tasks.

Barrios says he spends half as much time to arrive at the correct code as he did before GitHub Copilot. The first time he used GitHub Copilot, it wrote an entire script for him based on a single comment. "In some cases, the code was even better than what I would have done myself," he said. "It was quite an amazing experience."

Barrios likens it to giving every developer an incredibly helpful personal assistant. Developers said GitHub Copilot was like magic. One said it was able to predict what she wanted to do so well, it was as though it could read her mind. Barrios is excited to see what happens as those productivity gains are realized by every developer at the company. "I think the possibilities for unlocking innovation are dramatic," he said.

Mercado Libre invests in the next generation of developers by offering its own two-month "bootcamp" for new hires to help them learn the company's software stack and solve problems the "Mercado Libre way.” While GitHub Copilot can help more experienced developers to write code faster and minimize the need for context switching, Brizuela sees a vast amount of potential in GitHub Copilot to accelerate this onboarding process and flatten the learning curve.

With GitHub Advanced Security, we're able to be more proactive than we had been in the past. We're able to give developers security feedback early, so they can fix potential issues before they find their way into production.

While speed and innovation are essential for staying ahead of the competition, as a payments provider, security is paramount at Mercado Libre. The company uses GitHub Advanced Security with secret scanning to evaluate every line of committed code for security issues. "We're able to be more proactive than we had been in the past," says Javier, a developer at Mercado Libre. "We're able to give developers security feedback early, so they can fix potential issues before they find their way into production."

GitHub Advanced Security runs automatically and in the background, staying out of developers' way until there's a need to intervene. Developers can rest assured that their code is secure without incorporating an additional set of tools and complex processes into their workflows.

Life without GitHub would be chaotic. We would have to spend a lot of time working on different functionality that isn't core to our business. GitHub takes care of that and unlocks our potential.

From securing commits to automating boilerplate code to easing deployment, GitHub provides peace of mind for developers at Mercado Libre. "Life without GitHub would be chaotic," Barrios says. "We would have to spend a lot of time working on different functionality that isn't core to our business. GitHub takes care of that and unlocks our potential."