10 years of GitHub

birthday

3 min read

GitHub celebrated its tenth birthday on Tuesday.

Since its launch in April 2008, the version control platform has come to define the way we build software. It’s difficult to see open source software culture evolving to the extent it has without GitHub. Its impact can be felt even beyond software. It has changed the ways users experience the web, and it has made artificial intelligence more pervasive than ever. For that reason, we should all pay tribute to GitHub – developers and non-developers alike.

You can find Packt on GitHub here. We have more than 1,400 code repositories for our products that you can use as you learn.

27 million developers have ‘contributed’ to GitHub’s success

GitHub now has more than 27 million developers on its platform and is home to more than 80 million projects. To say thank you to everyone who has been a part of the last 10 years – everyone who has quite literally contributed to its success – the team put together this short video:

Key GitHub milestones

Let’s take a look at some of the most important milestones in GitHub’s first decade.

Find out more here.

April 12, 2008 – GitHub officially launches. Read the post from 2008 to take a trip back in time…
May 21, 2009 – Node.js launches and its saga begins. From io.js forking in 2014, to reunification a year later, the JavaScript library is today one of the most popular tools on GitHub. There are almost 2,000 contributors to Node.js Core, the central Node.js project.
January 1, 2012 – JavaScript begins 2012 as the most popular language on GitHub. More than 6 years later that still remains the case.
January 16, 2013 – GitHub reaches 3 million users. In the space of just 5 year,s the platform was truly embedded in the software landscape.
October 23, 2014 – Microsoft takes the significant step of making .NET open source. This was the start of a cultural shift at Microsoft that’s still happening today. Perhaps more than any other moment in the history of open source, this underlined the fact that it was no longer a niche stream of the software landscape. It had become part of the mainstream.
March 2, 2015 – Unreal Engine 4 makes its source code available for free. This gave game developers access to an incredibly powerful tool for no cost whatsoever. The impact on the growth of game development is important to note. ‘Games’ was one of the most popular topics on the platform in 2017.
December 3, 2015 – Mirroring the move made by Microsoft in 2014, Apple makes Swift open source. Again, this was a huge tech company – with a similar reputation for isolationism – embracing open source.
February 15, 2017 – The launch of TensorFlow 1.0 marks the start of the boom in artificial intelligence. Or more specifically, it marks a point at which artificial intelligence and machine learning became accessible to millions more people than ever before. The range of projects that TensorFlow has been a part of is astonishing – from research to medicine to marketing, its accessibility has had an impact on the world in ways that many people don’t realise.
May 31, 2017 – GitHub’s 100 millionth pull request is merged.