Thank you for 10 years

On this day 10 years ago, GitHub officially went live. We started with a pretty simple purpose: to connect developers and make it easier for them to work together on projects with Git. In the last decade, we’ve evolved as a company and as a platform, but the reason why GitHub exists is fundamentally the same. What makes this platform special isn’t an idea or an invention. It’s the people using it—and GitHub is celebrating 10 years because of you, our community.

When we look back at the last decade, it’s not any one individual piece of software that we remember, it’s what people have done with it. You’ve shared, taught, tinkered, and built on GitHub from all around the world. At launch, we couldn’t have anticipated the number of projects we’ve seen take shape, the one-line programs and massive frameworks. We also never imagined that businesses would become so deeply invested in the open source community or that so many of you would learn from each other’s code.

GitHub launched at a time when technology was connecting people in new ways, but as I wrote in our launch post, let’s not pontificate on the journey. Your work speaks for itself—and we’ve collected some of our favorite moments and milestones to celebrate just a few of the ways you’ve pushed software forward.

As we look ahead, I’ll keep this simple. Together, you have defined what software is today. And you’ll continue to shape its future in the years to come. So what’s in store for the next 10 years of software? We’ll follow your lead.

In the meantime, we thank you for the code you’ve committed, the pull requests you’ve merged, the documentation you’ve written, the projects you’ve shared, and for the 10 years of GitHub you’ve made possible. We’re grateful for them all, and we can’t wait to see what you build next.

In the meantime, take a look back at the last 10 years of code.

Written by

Chris Wanstrath

@defunkt