15 Years of GitHub
A look back at the 15th anniversary of GitHub, from its creation in October 2007 to its launch in March 2008. Learn about the features created by the three co-founders in the waiting period for credit card processor approval.
defunkt
publishing indie games @nullgames board member @computerhistory former @github cofounder and ceo really bad at @marvelsnap
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15 years ago today, GitHub officially launched: https://t.co/cARXVo4Lnv
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
The Rails app was created in October 2007. Beta started in early January. Our company, Logical Awesome LLC, was incorporated on leap day. By mid-March the site was ready to launch, but we had to wait for approval from our credit card processor since we were so new.
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
In those early months, GitHub had grown from two co-founders to three. As we waited for our processor's approval, each of us worked on a new feature in secret. All three of those features were released on launch day.
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
Tom created the Network Graph, which you can still find under the Insights tab of every repo. It's been rewritten, but the UI has changed very little in 15 years: https://t.co/lOvvtdD8Wf
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
PJ added integrations to GitHub, paving the way for everything from ChatOps to GitHub Actions: https://t.co/YpO2VkIdj5
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
And I added commit comments, the first version of code review on GitHub that evolved into modern Pull Requests: https://t.co/Kwpl4moZaH
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
Also on launch day, Ruby on Rails officially moved to GitHub. Absolutely huge for us: https://t.co/8XDj1E4J6y
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
One of my favorite things from back then was our "Down for Maintenance" page. It would display a random YouTube video from a list we made. A bunch of them were Django co-creator @adrianholovaty playing guitar, like this one: https://t.co/cLv231vrRB
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
Something else fun - one of the earliest homepages is still available on @internetarchive. For a while I was manually updating the "featured project" every day: https://t.co/2Xe8vrxeBR
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
Original dashboard: https://t.co/9R822lZVgG
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
Original profile page: https://t.co/oqv0wRmOXT
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
Original tree page: https://t.co/Y8Ymwseimj
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
Repo homepage URLs were in the format of https://t.co/wZPzzVrNOK until I saw someone give a talk and put their repo's GitHub URL on a slide. I thought, "Wow, that's ugly." So we changed it to just https://t.co/rrbwEE8iqd for the default branch. Much nicer.
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023 -
Thanks for a great 15 years everyone. If those early users hadn't signed up and started paying in April 2008, there'd be no GitHub today. We took $0 in VC funding until 2012, so it truly is all thanks to you. Hopefully you got your $7/mo worth.
— defunkt (@defunkt) April 10, 2023