From Collaborative Coding to Wedding Invitations: GitHub Is Going Mainstream

Bubby Rayber's wedding date was coming up fast. Too fast. It was April, and in less than a month, he was supposed to host a daylong event for about 1,000 guests on the southern tip of India, and he needed a quick way to share the details. So the 28-year-old senior systems engineer at LinkedIn turned to a familiar website for help. Rayber invited friends via GitHub, the go-to social networking site for programmers.

People don't typically use GitHub for wedding invites. Launched in 2008 as a platform to collaborate on software projects, GitHub stores whatever you're working on and keeps track of the changes you make. It shares the document with all the world and encourages the world to comment back. Coders love it, and recently, they've been branching out.

As it turns out, that wedding invitation and an open source software project have more in common than you'd think. In Rayber's case, soon after he uploaded his wedding invitation, one guest fixed a typo, and another added a cute congratulatory note. The folks at GitHub think this style of cooperative tinkering represents the future: a world where anyone can suggest improvements to almost any project, and all fixes can be discussed like Facebook posts.

"The open, collaborative workflow we have created for software development is so appealing that it's gaining traction for non-software projects that require significant collaboration," says GitHub cofounder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner.

Last year, Twitter's top lawyer, Benjamin Lee, used GitHub to draft a new licensing agreement for his company's engineers, and before long, other GitHub users had fixed a handful of minor grammatical errors. Then Trishan Arul, head of business operations at Twitter cofounder Evan Williams' startup incubator, Obvious, suggested some text that he wanted Lee to incorporate, and Lee did.

In a completely different realm, Adam Wood, music director of an Episcopal church in Texas, is uploading a compendium of Gregorian chants to GitHub. He thinks the service is the perfect place for choir directors to share and improve all kinds of music.

With 3.4 million users, the five-year-old site is a runaway hit in the hacker community, the go-to place for coders to show off pet projects and crowdsource any improvements. But the company has grander ambitions: It wants to change the way people work. It's starting with software developers for sure, but maybe one day anyone who edits text in one form or another -- lawyers, writers, and civil servants -- will do it the GitHub way.

To first-time visitors, GitHub looks like a twisted version of Facebook, built in some alternate universe where YouTube videos and photos of cats have somehow morphed into snippets of code. But many of the underlying concepts are the same. You can "follow" other hackers to see what they're working on. You can comment on their code -- much like you'd do on a Facebook photo. You can even "star" a project to show that you like it, just as you'd "favorite" something on Twitter.

But it's much more than a social network. People discover new projects and then play around with them, making changes, trying out new ideas. Then, with the push of a button, they merge into something better. You can also "fork" projects. That's GitHub lingo for then when you make a copy of a project so you can then build and modify your own, independent version.

People didn't just suggest changes to Lee's Twitter patent license. It was forked 53 times: by Arul, by a computer science student in Portland, by a Belgian bicycle designer. These forks can now evolve and potentially even merge back into Lee's agreement. The experiment also inspired Fenwick & West, one of Silicon Valley's top legal firms (and GitHub's law firm) to post 30 pages of standard documents for startups to GitHub earlier this year.

"My guess is that in the future this is a tool that legal professionals are really going to use," says Ted Wang, one of the firm’s partners.

That's what Tom Preston-Werner and his GitHub team are banking on. Anyone can use the site to host an open-source project for free, and that's what most users are doing. But for a fee, companies can keep their software and other projects hidden from view, or even install their own private version of GitHub, tucked away behind corporate firewalls. Depending on the project, they pay anywhere from a few dollars per month to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

Preston-Werner, 34, says he's really selling his customers a better way to work together, something akin to the quality control regimen championed by General Electric under Jack Welch. "GE has the Six Sigma philosophy," Preston-Werner says. "That's how they make sure their products have the right kind of quality and how they assemble teams. We have the GitHub way. And we think a lot of people can learn from that, and have better output, higher quality and much greater happiness doing it."

Last year, the company accepted an astonishing $100 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That big investment reflects big ambitions. "We believe that this is an absolute franchise business," says Peter Levine, a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz. He sees the company as a developer play, first and foremost. But he thinks the GitHub way could work just about any place where text needs to be stored, edited, and discussed: law firms, hospitals, banks, design shops.

"The kinds of things that GitHub does for source code certainly could be applied to other industries. And whether GitHub does it or other companies do it on top of GitHub, one could imagine this as being a really interesting collaboration platform," Levine says.

Lots of people want to sell Web-based collaboration tools to big businesses. And while it's not clear that the corporate types who buy Microsoft's Yammer or IBM Connections software will ever be comfortable in the GitHub world, GitHub does have something those endeavors lack: legions of super-fans who already use it to host their personal projects. These are the people who are experimenting with GitHub, and pushing to install it on the corporate networks they use in their day jobs.

'This Is Where GitHub Came From'

It's Beer:30 at GitHub's 14,000-square-foot loft-style headquarters in San Francisco's SoMa district. That’s their name for the weekly two-hour show that is part staff gabfest, part TED talk. Close to half of the company’s 158 staffers, most of them young white men, lounge in the Cafe, the company's pool-table-and-video-game-flanked meeting place.

Seemingly all of the GitHubbers hold either a MacBook or a beer. Some sit at tables, others at the long, amply stocked wooden bar by the windows. Outside, thousands of Giants fans stream by in the April sunshine, happy the team has beaten its World Series rival, St Louis, 1-0.

Four video cameras are trained on a wooden stage, where Preston-Werner, wearing jeans and a black GitHub T-shirt, holds forth at the podium. Craft beer in hand, he rails against BART, the Bay Area's commuter subway, which he and his wife had used earlier that week to take their infant son to a farmers market.

He calls the transit system a "master class" in bad design. The elevators were poorly situated and hard to find; the ticketing machines dumped out nearly $20 worth of change in quarters; the smells were appalling. Whose idea, he wants to know, was it to put carpet on the floor of a subway car?

"This is where GitHub came from," he says. "Identifying a bad solution and making a better one."

Six years ago, Preston-Werner and his co-founders, Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett, were typical Bay Area developers. Microsoft was trying, unsuccessfully, to get Preston-Werner to stay on as a coder at PowerSet, the search startup it had just acquired. Wanstrath and Hyett had quit their jobs at CNet to launch a website called FamSpam. It wasn't taking off.

Working for big companies had soured the three of them. They hated the slowness and bureaucracy, the lack of autonomy. "You work somewhere for two years, until you get so bored and frustrated that you quit," Preston-Werner says. Meeting over beers at Zeke’s, a South of Market sports bar, they decided to launch GitHub as a side project. The "bad solution" they were trying to fix was Linus Torvalds' Git software, a program that the inventor of the Linux operating system had designed to keep track of changes.

Git was great for geeky developers, but most of the world had a hard time setting it up and using it. So Preston-Werner and Wanstrath created a website that made it easier to share code that was managed using Git. In 2008, they opened it up in a private beta to friends.

Within three months, GitHub had 6,000 users, many of them sharing code from their own projects. Preston-Werner and Wanstrath, now a developer with the company, brought Hyett on board as chief operations officer. Companies liked the set-up so much they offered to pay for the service, and a business plan was born. (“I don’t feel comfortable not paying you guys,” Geoffrey Grosenbach, the founder of PeepCode, wrote in an email. “Can I just send a check?”) GitHub Enterprise enables the site to be one of the few social networks that doesn’t court advertisers.

To people who do not program, a visit to GitHub is a daunting run through the hacker jargon gauntlet. There are repositories, or "repos," big chunks of code or text that get edited and “forked.” There are smaller snippets, called Gists. It's tough for non-technical users to figure things out, but for engineers, this stuff is candy.

GitHub's big innovation is the "pull request." It's what you do after forking something -- an electronic note that GitHub sends a software developer, saying, "Hey, I was checking out your project and I found a way to make it better. Look here and you can see what I've changed; press this button and the changes will become part of your project." The pull request makes it easy for anybody to fix a typo in a document, or a bug in a software program, or propose new language to a legal document.

Some Silicon Valley startups won't even consider applicants who don't have a GitHub account. At Facebook, about half of new engineering applicants attach a GitHub link to their resumes. "It's becoming part of the package," says Adam Ward, a recruiting director at Facebook. "People do show their personalities through their accounts. You see how they take and give feedback."

Here's what you learn from Preston-Werner’s profile: GitHub's CEO has started more than 40 repositories, including at least one runaway hit, a blogging engine for hackers called Jeckl that lets you run your entire website out of GitHub. Jeckl has been starred more than 12,000 times and forked by nearly 2,000 people. Both are remarkable numbers by GitHub standards.

Scrolling down the page, you can see that Preston-Werner writes much more code than the average CEO, but there are glimpses of his other interests as well. There are photos of GitHub's custom beer refrigerator in a repo called "Octobeer - The GitHub Kegerator Project." That's been forked three times. He has a repo of his favorite San Francisco vegetarian-friendly restaurants. It has 37 forks and dozens and dozens of changes, almost all from vegetarians who have fixed typos or added their favorite restaurants, bars and ice cream shops.

Preston-Werner wants the GitHubbers to think about things like redesigning subway rides because he doesn't want them to forget their mission: reinventing the way that people work. To that end, he has already spent close to $4 million re-inventing the tools that his staffers use. The company's only acquisition, which closed before it took in the $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz, was a five-person company that built web developer tools and software to help people share presentation slides online.

That $100 million is more than you'd expect a venture firm to put into a company that builds source code management software, but GitHub’s social network status sets it apart. "Developers are the new rock stars," says Jason Pressman, a managing director with Shasta Ventures, a Menlo Park, California, venture capital firm. "Who would have thought in the 50s that rock stars could sell cars and everything else? Developers are gaining this kind of influence, so GitHub holds tremendous value as the hub of developers."

GitHub in the White House

Today, GitHub has a lot of paying customers: Blizzard Entertainment, Etsy, and RackSpace, a large cloud services company, to name a few. Most important tech companies, even Microsoft, have public GitHub pages. It has a lot of fans too. The company does a brisk business in GitHub themed hoodies, pint mugs and stickers of its corporate icon, the five-legged Octocat.

But how GitHub will achieve its ambition to change the work world isn't so clear. Preston-Werner says that a product roadmap would be contrary to GitHub's DNA. "I think the concept of roadmaps is broken,” he explains. “The danger to over-promise and under-deliver is extremely high. We don't talk about new features or products until they launch."

But VCs Levine and Pressman think that GitHub has an advantage because it’s becoming a platform. With 3 million-plus users, it could land in some companies much the same way that Linux, and the PC, got in there, popping up the software behind custom-built sharing platforms. "Absolutely there's a way for GitHub to sneak into the enterprise," says Pressman.

Just look at the way GitHub snuck into the White House. A year ago, White House CIO Steven VanRoekel began work on a plan to make government data more accessible. Federal agencies are a trove of information, everything from court records to FCC data on pirate radio stations, but it's often hard for software developers to write programs that can access this data.

VanRoekel, who'd spent 15 years at Microsoft before coming to Washington, got tagged with fixing that. Last summer, his team hammered out a set of software tools and policy documents that serve as instruction manuals for bureaucrats.

It's called Project Open Data and it was written — and coded — on GitHub. In the beginning, the project was stored in private repositories that were available to a working group of the agencies that fall under VanRoekel's purview. Whenever someone wanted to make a big change, they didn't email the group or pick up the telephone: they submitted a pull request.

In May, VanRoekel's office released software that agencies must use to open up their databases to outside developers. Those programs are hosted publicly on GitHub along with the Open Data policy documents. "It's the first time the White House has issued policy coupled with a GitHub repository," VanRoekel says. So if you know better than the bureaucrats and want to improve their definition of "open licenses,” go for it. Fork it and submit a pull request to the White House.

VanRoekel is using GitHub to open up the federal government, but there is an entirely new community of designers that is only starting to figure out how to collaborate on the things they're building on 3-D printers, and that may represent an area of growth for GitHub. A Salt Lake City, Utah, software developer named Duane Johnson recently open-sourced his house on GitHub. He’s posting 3-D printer designs for small home-improvement projects: a sink aerator, a thin piece of plastic to hold down the living room carpet, a cutlery tray insert.

Johnson's designs are dense and complex. They aren't as easy to hack as source code or a list of vegetarian restaurants, but Preston-Werner thinks his company can improve things by making GitHub work better with the tools used by the 3-D printing community. "3-D printing is ripe for innovation," he says. "We can be part of that equation and I would love to be."

There's a 3-D printer right around the corner from GitHub's Egg Room (a 60's style chill spot with knockoff Aarnio ball chairs). GitHubbers are encouraged to use it if they can think of something cool to print out. Last December, GitHubber Yossef Mendelssohn broke his foot and was having a hard time hobbling around with both a cane and crutches, so he designed and printed a clamping mechanism that let him snap his cane onto the crutches. The source code is available to anyone.

Is Mendelssohn's clamp going to be something big? No. But toying around with 3-D printers is still important in order to figure out ways to usefully open-source designs. It may take another five years, but when 3-D designers and hardware hackers are ready for an open-source revolution, GitHub will be there. "If we can make it so easy to print something on a 3D printer that every normal person feels comfortable doing it... we've made it so that open source can start affecting the hardware world in the same way that it's already affecting the software world," says Preston-Werner. "That's what I would love to do."