Github is the world’s largest gay social network. Development began in October 2007, the first beta was released in February 2008, and the official release was released in April, which is almost 14 years ago. During this period, Github has added social elements such as Star, fork, wiki, Follow, Sponsor and so on to its products. Taking advantage of open source, Github has become the largest gay community of programmers in the world.

Github is becoming more and more popular now. There are already a lot of people starting from this segmentation field, attracting a lot of attention, and finally introducing traffic into the public account for cash.

HelloGitHub updates frequently once a month. According to the number of updates, it has been continuously done for about 5 years.

GitHubDaily also has many articles on Zhihu.

In addition, if you search Github on wechat, you will see a large number of public accounts with this name.

Github, which gathers all kinds of information, is a huge source of content. Many people transfer things on Github to Zhihu, CSDN and Knowledge Planet to attract users.

How did Github come about?

The birth of the Git

Before we talk about how Github started, we have to talk about the birth of Git, because Github’s original goal was to make Git more convenient to use.

Git is a distributed version control software originally created by Linus Torvalds and released as the GPL in 2005. It was originally designed to better manage Linux kernel development.

Linus Torvalds has been lacking a good version management tool since he opened the Linux kernel. Starting in 2002, Linus Torvalds decided to use BitKeeper as the primary version control system for the Linux kernel to maintain code. Since BitKeeper is proprietary, this decision has long been questioned in the community. In the Linux community, Richard Stallman and members of the Free Software Foundation, in particular, advocate the use of open source software as the core version control system for Linux. Linus Torvalds considered using off-the-shelf software (such as Monotone) as a version control system, but these had some problems, notably poor performance.

In 2005, Andrew Trigu wrote a simple program that connected to BitKeeper’s repository, and Larry McAvoy, the copyright owner of BitKeeper, decided to withdraw his license to use BitKeeper for free, believing that Andrew Trigu had reverse-engineered the protocols used inside BitKeeper. The Linux kernel development team held discussions with BitMover, but were unable to resolve their differences. Linus Torvalds decided to develop his own version control system to replace BitKeeper and wrote the first Git version in ten days. So far, the core logic of Git has not changed significantly.

Unlike centralized CVS and SVN, Git does not necessarily need a server-side control software to carry out version control, which does not involve permissions, gateway problems, and other inefficient problems. Each Git side is a complete source code version control library, so software distribution, communication, and so on is very convenient, and very fast.

The advent of Git has revolutionized the open source community. The open-source, free, distributed version control system has made it possible for tens of thousands of people to collaborate. Previously, centralized versioning was used, recording changes between versions and requiring a good network to submit code for collaboration. Git each commit is a snapshot of the entire file, using the calculated hashCode as the current version number.

The birth of the lot

The GitHub platform began development on October 1, 2007, and was written in Ruby on Rails by GitHub developers Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-Werner. The site was launched in beta in February 2008 and officially launched in April.

Git, although developed by the Linux kernel community, has been tepid for years. It really took off in the open source community from the Ruby community and Github.

Github was born out of the Ruby community, as the three founders were also active in the Ruby community. Github started as a simple weekend project.

Rails is a highly integrated Web framework, and it’s usually enough for one or two Rails programmers to work on a Web project, but once multiple people are working on a Rails project, code submission and collaboration can be cumbersome, let alone large-scale remote collaboration on open source projects. This is one of the sore points of Rails projects: a single engineer can be very productive, but teamwork is difficult, and centralized commit version control systems like CVS/SVN don’t support Rails teams very well.

Github itself is also a product of this need. Some programmers in the Bay Area Ruby community used Git and couldn’t find a good Git hosting site, so they developed Github. Then the Rails framework was first migrated to Github, creating a demonstration effect that sent the entire Ruby community roaring up. Another benefit of the Ruby community is that all open source libraries and packages are distributed in the Gem format, and once a large number of gems migrate to Github, Ruby programmers start using Github as well.

The Ruby community is a fairly tight-knit community with very little fragmentation and often, once a technology is adopted, the whole community quickly follows and adopts it. Although Ruby is a niche programming language in China, it is very popular in Silicon Valley and is hailed as the Web programming language of the cloud computing era. The entire Ruby community migrated to Github and began to have a demonstration effect on other programming language communities, which then followed.

About Github’s two rounds of funding

Since its establishment, Github has grown rapidly with the support of the community. By offering free code hosting, programmers around the world have a collaborative community that actively uploades large amounts of code to Github. Github also offers paid functionality, but you don’t realize it when you use it. Github is in the open source world, and few people assume that Github is involved in funding, and few think about the cost of running the company.

As A result, during the Series A round, many people were worried that Github would accelerate its commercialization process and become less pure. Instead, Github’s additional investment accelerated its expansion and popularity, making Github ubiquitous and accessible to more people.

Github has never been averse to capital investment, and the reason it didn’t accept capital investment in its early days was that the company didn’t need money, per se. Now it seems that Github has been able to develop a unique corporate culture and values for this very reason, without being sucked into capital too early, without distorting the company’s development trajectory and value orientation.

When It was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, many developers fled Github for hosting platforms such as Gitlab. Now it seems that Microsoft has not intervened too much in the direction of Github’s independent development. Although the most basic services have been fully integrated with Microsoft, the user experience remains the same for you and me, and the people who fled have come back.

Github’s history

2005

Linus created Git in 10 days. Git was just a command-line program, and programmers couldn’t share good code with each other, giving Github and other visual version control systems an opportunity.

2008

On April 3rd, the first platform project Ruby on Rails was launched.

On April 10, Github launched its official version.

In July, the function of the gists was published, for gists in a managed code snippet.

In December, it launched Pages, a feature that allows developers to create websites.

2009

On May 21, Nodejs logged on to Github.

In October, the issue went online.

2011

January 1st Travis CI’s first pull request.

In November, we launched enterprise project and transfused c-side products through SaaS payment.

In November, Github had 1 million users.

2012

In January, JavaScript became the most popular language on GitHub, and in 2012 JavaScript became the most popular language across the platform — far ahead of Ruby, Java, and Python. Today, it remains at the top of GitHub’s popular list.

In July, GitHub raised $100 million in A Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

2013

In January, the GitHub community welcomed 3 million users.

In March, GitHub hit 3 million users

In May, the White House posted a draft of its official “Open Data Policy” on GitHub. Symbolically important, hosting government policy documents on a private company’s server is unheard of.

In December 2013, 10 million repositories were hosted on GitHub

2014

In March, we started to do open platform

In may, the Atom editor, which VSCode is based on, became free and open source.

October, Microsoft open source system. Net

2015

April 2015, $250 million, Series B, sequoia Capital led the round.

In June 2015, GitHub moved out of the U.S. to set up an office in Japan.

In July 2015, more than 9 million users hosted more than 21 million repositories, making it the largest code repository in the world.

In September 2015, GitHub Classrooms opened, making it easier for teachers to distribute beginner code and collect assignments on GitHub. GitHub’s creation makes it easier for teachers to teach and assign assignments.

In December 2015, Apple opened Swift to the public. Swift’s open source provides new development tools and encourages more companies to release their development tools to the public.

2016

GitHub introduced a searchable public database of data to the platform in June 2016.

In July 2016, the Apollo 11 code was open sourced.

Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, and 47 years later, its source code is available on GitHub. NASA maintains hundreds of open source projects. In the public library, you can find code for virtualizing Martian Terrain and TensorFlow, which identifies alien objects. You’ll also find SpaceX’s open-source compiled code.

2017

In February 2017, the Python team open-source their first pull request. The Python maintenance team announced their plans to enter the GitHub community at the beginning of 2016 and made their first pull request public in 2017. Over the past decade, Python has evolved into one of the fastest growing programming languages. Since 2015, it has been the third most popular language on GitHub, with a 70% annual growth rate. There is a strong tendency to surpass C in the language rankings by June 2021.

In June 2017, 100 million PR merge requests were completed on GitHub.

In December 2017, users added 2,800,000,000 lines of code to GitHub.

2018

On April 10, 2018, the 10th anniversary, the community has grown to 27 million developers, working on more than 80 million projects worldwide.

In June 2018, Microsoft announced that it was acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion, which was the big deal of 2018.

In July 2018, there were 30 million developers on GitHub. In October 2018, Microsoft completed GitHub.

2019

Github users can use Github’s private libraries for free.

2020

conclusion

Github, as a Git-based code hosting site, was founded at a time when people needed to be connected, and its development was inseparable from the needs and vitality of the open source community. Github has solved the problem of software programming collaboration that has plagued millions of people. Not only has it made programming easier, it has designed elegant solutions that the market is in need of and has grown dramatically. Make money while providing value to the open source community by building SAAS services around the open source project Git.