When was github launched

GitHub will slowly open Actions to developers, starting with daily batches for the time being. You can sign up for access here.

In addition to Actions, GitHub also announced a number of other new features on its platform. So what else is new? GitHub Connect, which connects the silo of GitHub Enterprise with the open source repositories on its public site, is now generally available, for example. GitHub Connect enables new features like unified search, that can search through both the open source code on the site and internal code, as well as a new Unified Business Identity feature that brings together the multiple GitHub Business accounts that many businesses now manage thanks, shadow IT under a single umbrella to improve billing, licensing and permissions.

The company also today launched three new courses in its Learning Lab that make it easier for developers to get started with the service, as well as a business version of Learning Lab for larger organizations.

To maintain the impressive momentum the company had established and realize its bolder ambitions, it needed capital. GitHub would use this funding to hire additional engineering talent and develop new products. This was not the case. By the time GitHub began looking for external investment, the product was already clearly defined with a large user base.

Best of all, GitHub had been profitable practically since Day 1. This freedom allowed GitHub to intentionally shape not only its product but also the culture of the entire organization, completely free of investor influence.

Too much outside influence can be dangerous. Having already achieved significant growth and amassing a legion of loyal programmer evangelists, GitHub wanted to expand its reach—and its potential revenues.

So why bother? Because we want to be better. We want to build the best products. We want to solve harder problems. We want to make life easier for more people. The experience and resources of Andreessen Horowitz can help us do that. This is one of the most fundamental misunderstandings that many people have about GitHub as a company and as a product. In many cases, GitHub had solved big, ambitious problems with programming itself.

What was particularly brilliant about GitHub was that it did so by creating a product that solved those problems that also created a vast potential market for that product.

Wanstrath and his friends could have focused on smaller, specific technical problems. Instead, they went after problems that were so big and so fundamentally inherent to programming at that time that solving them created a vast potential market for their product.

This appeal reached far beyond open-source hobbyists and script kids hacking in their bedrooms. It was also powerfully attractive to large corporate interests.

Some firms, such as Mozilla, had several hundred repos and hosted virtually everything on GitHub. By the end of , GitHub had 2. It was the first time that federal legislative policy had been shared in such a manner. Hosting governmental policy documents externally on the servers of a private company was unheard of, as was the notion of allowing the public to fork and merge policy documents.

The announcement was incredible free PR for GitHub, and it also hinted at other potential use cases for GitHub that open-data advocates and tech-savvy policy wonks had been talking about for years—even if those use cases would ultimately never materialize. By , GitHub was version control for many programmers. But it was far more than just that: It was a social hub where coders could learn from one another.

It was a programmer portfolio site, social network, and professional networking hub. Of course, the bigger you are, the bigger a target you become. On March 28, , GitHub endured the largest cyberattack it had experienced since launch. The attack—a standard distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS—was believed to have originated in China. But the attack was not an attempt to cripple an American company for the benefit of an Asian competitor.

Instead, the attack was allegedly aimed at just two GitHub projects. Speaking about the funding, Chris Wanstrath told reporters the company planned to use its Series B funding to make significant investments, develop new products, and—most significantly— expand internationally. GitHub continued to expand. By July , GitHub had more than 9M users and was hosting over 21M repositories, officially making GitHub the largest code repository in the world.

However, although GitHub was still growing—at a rate of 10, new users per workday by September —the pace of that growth was slowing. GitHub was facing heightened competition from both Bitbucket and GitLab, and user growth suffered as a result. Revenue, on the other hand, was increasing rapidly. Revenues from GitHub Enterprise had tripled.

There was talk of an IPO, rumors of unlikely acquisitions, and conspiracy theories about even less likely mergers. Source: Microsoft. Many people pledged to leave GitHub in protest.

Some users posted that they were already in the process of migrating their repositories from GitHub to competing services GitLab or Bitbucket. People made nervous jokes about the security of their code. Others cracked wise about how Clippy would soon be helping developers deploy their projects to Azure.

GitHub has been the industry standard in collaborative software development for a decade. The real question is whether Microsoft will use GitHub smartly. Even now, coding as a discipline is plagued with problems and inefficiencies. One of the most logical moves GitHub could make is developing additional tools to help devs focus on solving problems such as error tracking and deploying apps to Microsoft Azure, and could even replace current QA workflows with AI-driven applications.

GitHub is already making inroads with professionals besides software engineers, such as with product managers. Another potential move for GitHub could be the introduction of additional features and functionality that appeal to these professionals, such as integrated project management tools. GitHub may have found a new home in Redmond, but there are still plenty of lessons to be learned from GitHub.

Making Git easier to use was a goal of GitHub, but it was never the ultimate goal. The true mission of GitHub was to make collaborating on and writing software easier. Every software developer in the world struggled with the problems that GitHub was trying to solve. This created an immense potential market that GitHub was ideally positioned to target. This created an enormous potential user base for GitHub and allowed the company to fundamentally reshape software development as we know it.

Think about your product and its place in the broader vertical your company operates in, then ask yourself:. GitHub succeeded because it solved a technical problem—the need for a better, more intuitive version control system—that had significant potential to solve a human problem, namely collaborating on software projects easily, securely, and remotely.

Even in its early years, GitHub recognized the importance of culture. The company deliberately and proactively created its own culture, rather than allowing culture to develop. To further scale the company, the founders decided to take their first-ever outside investment. That same year, GitHub crossed the 2 million developer mark. GitHub became one of the major accelerants of that statement.

The funding allowed GitHub to further build out its suite of Enterprise products and hire the necessary manpower to engage in the lengthy sales cycles that are prevalent when dealing with corporates.

A year after the funding, GitHub finally started to enter the public eye. Others started to use it to write a book, file legal documents, or even plan their wedding.

At the beginning of , GitHub announced some major reshuffling within its c-suite. Preston-Werner was replaced by Wanstrath who held the President position in the years prior. The change was announced, well, I let you be the judge of that…. Unfortunately, not all was fun and well at GitHub — and the executive swap an early sign of things to come. Horvath announced her resignation via Twitter and issued her frustration without explicitly stating names about her treatment at GitHub.

The company launched an immediate investigation, which resulted in the termination of one of its employees — and co-founders. In the following weeks, detailed reports emerged, stating that Preston-Werner and his wife who also worked for GitHub were the employees these harassment claims were targeted at. While both never admitted any wrongdoing pertaining to the sexual harassment, both husband and wife resigned from the company just weeks later.

Its grip on the software development world became so imminent that it even forced other tech giants to abandon similar projects. In , Google would shut down its Code tool. Microsoft would follow suit in with the termination of CodePlex. That same year, GitHub would announce its second major funding round. The increasing worldwide relevance came with its own set of problems, though.

By the late s, Microsoft saw the movement towards open source as one of the major threats to its business and leading position. Nevertheless, many in the development community became increasingly worried that the acquisition would result in increased pricing and a shift towards Microsoft products. Luckily for its users, the opposite occurred. In , for instance, the company announced that its free users would receive unlimited private repositories. A year later, the announcement was followed up by making private repositories free for all teams, a move that especially benefitted early-stage software founders.

In July , GitHub prevented developers from Crimea, Iran, Syria, and other sanctioned countries from accessing parts of its service as I direct result of the United States immigration policies. Naming it Gitee, the platform is intended to shift much of the code developed by Chinese engineers over to the motherland. The company employs over 2, people across 8 worldwide offices.

GitHub makes money via subscription plans and fees on third-party app sales. GitHub offers 4 distinct subscription plans for both individuals and teams. The Free plan, as the name indicates, can be used free of charge. The plan is suited for individuals or small development teams that do not need a lot of features and storage. In this case, GitHub utilizes a freemium model to eventually lure in paying customers by getting them used to the platform and creating a need for more premium features for instance, once a project scales.