Introduced at GitHub Universe late last year, GitHub Actions promise to simplify how we automate processes around our code, applications and infrastructure. In this talk, I aim to introduce Actions and hopefully build excitement about how they can simplify our processes and bring automation to parts of our projects that we don't typically think about. First, we're going to talk about Webhooks, GitHub's notification system for communicating activity to external systems. While we typically think about webhooks being delivered in response to pushing commits to our projects, GitHub can deliver a webhook in response to almost any activity within the platform. Next we'll discuss how existing automation platforms like Jenkins or Travis-CI work. At a glance, GitHub Actions aren't super different from a managed service like Travis. However, two key differentiators stand out: 1. Workflows can be tied to **any event in GitHub**. This means we can build automation workflows around more than just pushes but also branch creation/deletion (to create/destroy branch-specific infrastructure), as developers join our repositories, comments in issues/PRs/Projects, etc. 2. Actions can be shared (and tested!) across repositories and the community. No longer do we have to duplicate automation pipelines across repos, if we can refactor and share it's one less source of duplication. Finally, I'm excited to talk about some of the things we're doing with Actions and how they're improving my teams ability to ship as quickly and confidently as possible.