GitHub

Founder / s: PJ Hyett, Chris Wanstrath, Tom Preston-Werner
Key people: Chris Wanstrath (Co-Founder & CEO), Nicole Sanchez (VP of Social Impact), Todd Berman (VP of Engineering), PJ Hyett (Co-Founder / COO), Phil Haack (Engineering Manager), Matt Colyer (Product Manager)

GitHub is the best place to build software together. Over 12 million people use GitHub to share code and build amazing things with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. With the performing features of GitHub.com, our desktop and mobile apps , And GitHub Enterprise, it has never ever easier for individuals and teams to write better code, faster. Originally founded by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett to simplify sharing code, GitHub has grown into the largest code host in the World.

History

On 24 February 2009, GitHub team members announced, in a talk at Yahoo! headquarters, that within the first year of being online, GitHub had accumulated over 46,000 public repositories, 17,000 of which were formed in the previous month alone. At that time, About 6,200 repositories had been forked at least once and 4,600 had been merged.

On 5 July 2009, GitHub declared that the site was now harnessed by over 100,000 users. On 27 July 2009, In ​​another talk delivered at Yahoo !, Tom Preston-Werner announced that GitHub had grown to host 90,000 unique public repositories, 12,000 having been Forked at least once for a total of 135,000 repositories.

On 25 July 2010, GitHub announced that it hosts 1 million repositories. On 20 April 2011, GitHub announced that it is hosting 2 million repositories.

On 2 June 2011, ReadWriteWeb reported that GitHub had surpassed SourceForge and Google Code in total number of commits for the period January to May 2011.

On 9 July 2012, Peter Levine, general partner at GitHub’s investor Andreessen Horowitz, stated that GitHub had been growing income at 300% since “good enough the entire way”.

On 16 January 2013, GitHub announced it had passed the 3 million users mark and was then hosting more than 5 million repositories. On 23 December 2013, GitHub announced it had reached 10 million repositories.

In June 2015, GitHub opened an office in Japan that is its first office outside of the US

On 29 July 2015, GitHub raised it already raised $ 250 million in funding in a round led by Sequoia Capital. The round valued the company at almost $ 2 billion.

In 2016, GitHub was ranked #14 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list.

Censorship

On 3 December 2014, GitHub was blocked in Russia for a few days over user-posted suicide manuals.

On 31 December 2014, GitHub was blocked in India (along with 31 other Websites) over pro-ISIS content posted by users. On 10 January 2015, GitHub was unblocked. Again, on 12 Sep 2015, GitHub was blocked all over India. The site was unblocked soon after.

On 26 March 2015, GitHub fell victim to a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack that lasted for more than 118 hours. The attack, which appeared to originate from China, primarily targeted GitHub-hosted user content describing methods of circumventing Internet censorship.

On 8 October 2016, GitHub access was blocked by the Turkish government to prevent email leakage of a hacked account belonging to the country’s Energy Minister.

Departure of Tom Preston-Werner

In March 2014, GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath alleged that founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner and his wife Theresa engaged in a pattern of harassment against her that led to her leaving the company. In April 2014, GitHub released a statement denying Horvath’s allegations. However, following an internal investigation, GitHub confirmed the claims. GitHub’s CEO Chris Wanstrath wrote on the company blog, “The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub’s CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse’s presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office.” Preston-Werner then resigned from the company.

Mascot

GitHub’s mascot, Octocat, is an anthropomorphized female cat with five octopus-like tentacles. The character was created by graphic designer Simon Oxley as clip art to sell on iStock, a website that enables designers to market royalty-free digital images.

GitHub became interested in Oxley’s work after Twitter selected a bird that he designed for their own logo The illustration GitHub was was a character that Oxley had named Octopuss. Since GitHub wanted Octopuss for their logo (a use that the iStock license disallows), they negotiated with Oxley to buy exclusive rights to the image.

GitHub renamed Octopuss to Octocat, And trademarked the character along with the new name. Later, GitHub hired illustrator Cameron McEfee to adapt Octocat for different purposes on the website and promotional materials; McEfee and various GitHub users have since made hundreds of variations of the character.