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The King of Code Repositories
Here’s the King of Cups, here’s the Night King, and then there’s GitHub, the king of code repositories.
A repository is where programmers store the source code of an application, along with the entire history of changes made by each contributor. This way, we can switch between different versions of a project with a simple command.
There are plenty of cloud platforms for hosting and sharing repositories remotely, but you’d have to hold me at gunpoint to make me use anything other than GitHub.
Today, GitHub generates over a billion dollars in annual revenue, but less than twenty years ago, it wasn’t even an idea. Where did developers upload their code before the Octocat came along? Who came up with the idea of creating a social network just for software developers? And… is there life after death?
I’m Carlos Sala, software developer, and this is the story of GitHub, the world’s largest collaborative coding platform.
The Birth of GitHub
In October 2007, Git had already become the most promising distributed version control system in the tech community, just three years after Linus Torvalds created it for developing the Linux kernel.
Git’s arrival on the software development scene paved the way for innovative business models built around collaborative coding technology. So it was only a matter of time before two programmers, Tom Preston-Werner and Chris Wanstrath, met up for beers at a bar in San Francisco.
There, they spotted a business opportunity no one had tapped into yet. Git users needed:
- A place to store code repositories in the cloud as a backup.
- An easier way to use Git?s features through graphical interfaces, so they wouldn?t have to memorize so many terminal commands.
- New functionalities like user management, permission controls, and the ability to clone other people?s public repositories using the concept of forking.
Their idea was a freemium business model, where most services would be free for all users while charging a monthly subscription for extras like private repositories or enterprise accounts.
With a clear vision in mind, Tom and Chris brought two more developers on board and started building GitHub using Ruby on Rails, a full-stack Ruby framework that was widely used at the time, fit their needs, and was already familiar to them.
GitHub’s Meteoric Rise
On April 10, 2008, the first version of GitHub was opened to the public after several weeks of beta testing with a closed group of users.
The timing couldn’t have been better for the project. Not only were they giving Git users exactly what they had been asking for, but they were also the first to build a cloud-based service around this technology. It was like taking a penalty shot at an open goal. All they needed was time to make a name for themselves in the developer community.
By the end of 2009, over 90,000 public repositories had been created among 100,000 registered users. In 2010, they hit the iconic milestone of one million repositories.
The number of users, repositories, and commits grew so fast that by 2011, GitHub had become the most widely used version control platform on the internet. It had surpassed earlier systems like SourceForge and Google Code, which initially operated with Mercurial before Git even existed. But they lacked the strong social component that GitHub brought to the table.
Of course, in GitHub’s early years, various competitors emerged, including Gitorious, Bitbucket, and GitLab. Some focused more on the open-source community, while others targeted large enterprises, but none came close to matching GitHub’s market share. And to this day, the gap between GitHub and its competition keeps getting wider.
The Supremacy of GitHub
By 2012, any tech company that wanted to be part of the developer community had to publish its open-source projects on GitHub.
With Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft integrating GitHub into their workflows, it became clear that GitHub was the standard place to share code. Just to name a few well-known examples, Microsoft?s Visual Studio Code, Facebook?s React, Google Web Toolkit, and Amazon?s AWS SDK were all published on GitHub around that time.
The relationship between GitHub and companies was mutually beneficial. GitHub charged enterprise accounts a subscription fee based on usage and employee count, while companies gained a reputation for transparency, making them more attractive to developers looking for jobs and more trustworthy to everyday users.
In July of that year, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz closed a 100 million dollar investment round for GitHub, the largest investment the firm had made at the time. This funding allowed GitHub to grow faster and expand its services faster than its competitors.
By the end of 2012, GitHub had 139 employees, and its revenue was growing by roughly 300 percent each year.
No doubt, this is a success story. But what kind of story would it be without a few bumps along the way?
Trouble in Paradise
As GitHub cemented its position as the leading platform for version control and code sharing, internal and external issues began to surface, putting its reputation to the test.
From workplace scandals to attacks on its infrastructure, GitHub faced difficult moments that tarnished its otherwise spotless track record.
Accusations of Sexism and Harassment
One of the most controversial moments in GitHub’s history came in 2014 when Julie Ann Horvath, a designer and programmer who had worked at the company since 2012, publicly accused GitHub of fostering a culture of harassment and sexism.
Julie claimed she had been subjected to a hostile work environment, facing intimidation from colleagues and inappropriate behavior from GitHub?s then-CEO, Tom Preston-Werner, and his wife.
In an interview with TechCrunch, she revealed that in her early years at GitHub, she was the only female designer or developer on the team. Despite the company’s public stance as a women-friendly workplace, she quickly felt isolated and undervalued. According to Julie, internal communication was aggressive, and her opinions were frequently dismissed or ridiculed.
Over time, the situation worsened when the wife of one of the founders began interfering in her work and personal life.
Allegedly, Tom Preston-Werner’s wife befriended Julie outside of work, only to pressure her, through threats and coercion, not to speak out against GitHub. She reportedly claimed to have significant influence over her husband’s decisions within the company.
Tensions escalated when Julie was called in by HR to explain conversations she had had both inside and outside the office about the issue. During one of these encounters, Tom’s wife allegedly told her she had access to Julie’s private messages on GitHub’s internal chat system. The growing sense of being monitored at work left her feeling constantly on edge.
But the final straw came when Julie decided to leave GitHub, unwilling to remain in what she considered a toxic and misogynistic environment. Though her resignation was confidential, an anonymous post attacking her reputation appeared on the social media platform Secret. The post quickly went viral, pushing her to go public with her accusations.
The tech media picked up the story, sparking outrage within the developer community and raising serious concerns about GitHub’s workplace culture. The company’s rapid growth over the previous two years had not been accompanied by the development of an ethical framework that any company of its size should have.
Under intense public pressure, GitHub launched an internal investigation that resulted in Tom Preston-Werner stepping down as CEO in April 2014. In a resignation letter published on his personal website, he indirectly acknowledged his mistakes, stating that he had not handled the situation properly.
Although GitHub later implemented changes to improve its workplace culture and organizational structure, the scandal left a lasting stain on its history and highlighted broader issues of diversity and equity in the tech industry.
The Biggest DDoS Attack in History
In addition to internal issues among its staff, GitHub has had to deal with various cyber threats since its launch in 2008.
The most significant attack occurred on February 28, 2018, when GitHub fell victim to the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack ever recorded, reaching a peak of 1.35 terabits per second (Tbps).
Unlike traditional botnet attacks, the attackers used an innovative technique known as Memcrashed. This method exploited a vulnerability in Memcached servers, an open-source caching system, allowing attackers to send manipulated requests to the exposed port 11211 of these servers on the internet.
By spoofing IP addresses, the attackers caused vulnerable servers to send responses that were thousands of times larger than usual to the target, overwhelming its infrastructure with a traffic volume it could not handle.
Akamai, the cloud security company that helped mitigate the attack, noted that the traffic came from more than 1,000 autonomous systems (ASN). The attack was carried out at a rate of 126.9 million packets per second, doubling the size of previous attacks like the Mirai malware attack in 2016.
In the end, it was just a scare, as despite the magnitude of the attack, GitHub managed to recover in a few minutes thanks to its DDoS mitigation infrastructure and Akamai’s support. Nonetheless, the incident highlighted the importance of securing Memcached servers, with recommendations for administrators to block or limit UDP traffic on port 11211 to prevent future amplification attacks of this nature.
The Acquisition of GitHub
After years of unprecedented growth and overcoming various crises that tested its reputation, GitHub found itself at a crossroads. Despite remaining the largest collaborative development platform in the world, doubts about its future began to grow.
What was the next step? Where should the company head? These questions led the company to consider new options. It was then that Microsoft made an offer that would change GitHub’s history forever.
On June 4, 2018, Microsoft announced the acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion. This move raised concerns among many developers, as Microsoft had not always been viewed favorably in the open-source community. For years, the company from Redmond had been perceived as an enemy of open-source software, with iconic phrases like Steve Ballmer’s 2001 comment calling Linux a “cancer.”
However, under the leadership of Satya Nadella, who, by the way, bears a resemblance to Gandhi, Microsoft had been taking steps for years to change its image with the open-source community. With projects like Visual Studio Code, TypeScript, the open-sourcing of .NET, and Linux compatibility within Windows, Microsoft had managed to clean up the proprietary software reputation that had always followed it.
The acquisition of GitHub was another piece in this new strategy, aimed at strengthening its presence in the developer community and positioning itself as a key player in the future of software development and distribution.
Nat Friedman, who was named CEO of GitHub after the acquisition, promised that the platform would continue to operate independently, without forced integrations with Microsoft products. He also assured that GitHub would remain an open platform for all developers, regardless of whether the tools and technologies they used were from Microsoft or the competition.
Despite initial skepticism, the acquisition turned out to be a success. Microsoft kept its commitment to open-source software, invested in improving GitHub’s infrastructure, and launched new products like GitHub Actions and, even better, GitHub Copilot.
Artificial Intelligence in GitHub
In October 2021, the popularity of artificial intelligence was soaring thanks to the rise of natural language models from OpenAI.
The latest of these was GPT-3, a model capable of generating text with almost human-like fluency, impressing everyone with its ability to write articles, answer questions, and even generate code from natural language descriptions.
Microsoft, which had boosted GitHub with improvements to its infrastructure and security since its acquisition, recognized that AI was going to be the next big revolution in the world of programming. So, in collaboration with OpenAI, it introduced GitHub Copilot, an AI-based tool that promised to change the way developers wrote code.
Copilot was developed on a model based on GPT-3 called Codex, specifically trained with source code from multiple programming languages. This allowed it to predict with considerable accuracy the next lines of code the developer was likely to write.
The launch of Copilot sparked controversy in the programming sector for several reasons:
- On one hand, programmers, including myself, feared for their jobs. Although, to be honest, this didn’t last long. When you try Copilot, you realize it’s a tool that only slightly speeds up the rate at which you write code. As its name suggests, it’s a copilot, meaning it still needs someone to steer the development. For now, it’s a crutch for developers and far from eliminating jobs.
- Another issue with GitHub Copilot was the licensing question. Given that the tool was trained on code from millions of GitHub repositories, under what license does the code it generates fall if it has been fed with projects licensed differently? Would you want your company’s code to be used to train a tool that could be used by your competitors?
Despite the controversies, Copilot’s adoption grew rapidly. In June 2022, GitHub released a paid version with a $10 monthly subscription, and by 2023, over a million developers were actively using it. Microsoft worked on integrating Copilot into other tools, like Visual Studio Code, and announced it would continue improving it with more advanced versions of the AI model.
GitHub Copilot undoubtedly started a new chapter in the platform’s history, showing that artificial intelligence could not only help developers but also redefine the way code is written. Copilot isn’t perfect, but it improves every day in personalizing the generated code, adapting to each programmer’s style, taking context from the project you’re working on, and from the code you’ve written in the past.
The Future of GitHub
Today, GitHub is practically a social network for developers, the place where we live. A key piece of the software ecosystem, and since the arrival of artificial intelligence, a laboratory where machines are beginning to write code alongside us.
But where is GitHub headed in the coming years? Under Microsoft’s wing and with tools like Copilot, it seems that the platform will continue working on automating software development.
Perhaps, in the future, repositories won’t just be static files, but living environments where AI actively collaborates with programmers, proposing changes, fixing bugs, and even writing code on its own.
And what I’m sure will happen is that at some point, Copilot will be fully integrated into the computer’s operating system, leveraging Microsoft’s powerful product, Windows.
GitHub has revolutionized software development in many ways and will continue to do so. From that San Francisco bar, where two guys saw an opportunity to offer services around Git technology, to becoming a company valued in billions of dollars.
