Only the beginning

2008 has been an incredible year for many of us, both here are GitHub and within the fantastic community that has bloomed around us and that we depend on.

I wanted to take a minute to expound on what has happened at GitHub over the last 12 months and what we envision over the next year and more.

A Look Back

First, where we’ve been. GitHub launched in beta almost exactly a year ago from code that Tom and Chris wrote together as a side project. The first private beta repository was created on January 12th. After a little over a month, PJ had joined the effort and the site had reached 1,000 repositories. In contrast, today we have over 50,000 public repositories.

In April, we got out of beta, were joined by the Rails project, and hit 1 million events. In June, I (Scott) started working on the site as a contractor, beginning with the Gist website. Tekkub started customer support in July. In August, Tom quit his day job and started GitHubbing it full time and in October, I formally joined the team.

Since we’ve all been working on it full time, just over the last six months, we’ve released Gists, Commit Comments, Subversion Importing, Code Search, Traffic Graphs, the Fork Queue, Pages, and more.

Over the course of the last year, we’ve had over 280 blog posts, 5,000 commits to the GitHub codebase, and dozens of speaking engagements. The website itself has had over :

• 27,000,000 events generated
• 40,000 users join
• 33,000 public repositories created
• 17,000 of those forked
• 40,000 gists created

It has been an awesome (and busy) year.

A Look Forward

CNet is reporting about how things are
good for open source in 2009. We couldn’t agree more, and we hope that GitHub can help the community grow.

In the coming year, we aim to continue building tools that help developers, and especially the open source community, be as productive as possible. This means providing the tools that save maintainers and contributors time, so they can use it to do what they should be doing: writing awesome code. GitHub is trying to make every part of project management and maintenance easy for you – we feel we’ve come a long way, and that there is a long way to go.

Our second main goal is to make Git easier to learn, use and adopt. We really believe that Git is the best SCM tool out there, and furthermore that learning it and using it well makes most developers so much more efficient in what they do that it’s an important thing to evangelize and train for. So, we’re constantly trying to rethink how to make it easier to learn Git (from beginning to advanced stuff) and how to make the argument of why switching to Git is so helpful as simply and succinctly as possible.

The last major GitHub goal is helping you get Git into the corporate environment. We remember from the early Rails days how difficult it can be to break a new and efficient technology into the place you work, so we want to help make that as simple as possible.

We look forward to the coming year with you, and thank you for making the last year possible. Happy new year, everyone!

The GitHub Team
(Chris, Tom, PJ and Scott)

Written by

Scott Chacon

@schacon