Today, 10 years after its public launch, GitHub sits at the center of all developer workflows. But reflecting on this first decade in business, it\u2019s not unrealistic to think that it\u2019ll be at the center of all workflows in the years to come. In fact, because of GitHub\u2019s roots in the developer community \u2014 and\u2026<\/b>
\nToday, 10 years after its public launch, GitHub sits at the center of all developer workflows. But reflecting on this first decade in business, it\u2019s not unrealistic to think that it\u2019ll be at the center of all workflows in the years to come. In fact, because of GitHub\u2019s roots in the developer community \u2014 and the increasing centrality of developers in general \u2014 understanding GitHub\u2019s trajectory may actually provide a glimpse of what the future of work holds for businesses everywhere.
After all, GitHub has accelerated trends that are now cliches. It helped make the idea that software is eating the world a reality, and meant that every company is becoming a tech company. It\u2019s already clear that, even in the near future, development teams are going to be the focal points of more and more organizations, and that GitHub will, too.
That\u2019s not to overstate what it means to offer the best version control system. Version control is arguably already a commodity. Instead, GitHub will win because of its power as an ecosystem to connect people with the code and insights that come from that.
That\u2019s why one of its earliest decisions may have been its most significant, then and now. GitHub released its public API within three months of the core service going live. This was a huge and meaningful commitment to make, basically making it possible for developers to interact with their system in any way they wanted \u2014 and affirming, unequivocally, that that\u2019s actually what GitHub\u2019s intention had been from the get-go.
Its mission back then was simple: to connect developers and make it easier for them to work together with Git. Its tagline then was even \u201csocial coding.\u201d And that sustained commitment to the connections inherent in coding was \u2014 and is \u2014 pretty transformative.
Nowhere was that more apparent in the early days than in the open source community. GitHub helped bring people together and collaborate asynchronously, working faster and more efficiently. That\u2019s what brought Rails, and Ruby, and node.js, and Bitcoin, and so much more to GitHub in the early days. GitHub and open source are pretty symbiotic: The communities led to more communities, but GitHub also helped take open source mainstream. And that sense of community is now woven into GitHub\u2019s DNA, permeating throughout GitHub\u2019s public and private repos but also the ways developers work today. GitHub became the de facto standard for source code management in part because it started by creating a social community around code. It\u2019s a bit of a chicken or egg situation, but I\u2019d credit GitHub with making coding social in the first place.
The big play underlying all these moves? To be the foundation of work, the infrastructure layer on top of which software is built. Though lots of companies have flirted with platform or developer-first ecosystems with APIs, these stories are rife with shifting directions and lack of commitment to their developer communities. GitHub set the standard for the tools you provide when addressing the developer community. If you want to build a developer product, you need to be a platform ecosystem.
That\u2019s exactly what GitHub has done, and what makes the decade ahead so exciting. Contrasted with alternatives like Gitlab and BitBucket, GitHub has taken a best-of-breed approach. It\u2019s essentially created a platform from which it\u2019s possible integrate the products and tools that are better than what it feels it can create. It\u2019s not building chat tools or CI functionality or project management on its own; instead, it makes it easy to integrate Slack, or Circle CI, or whatever else you might want.
This support is something my team and I have seen firsthand, as we\u2019re building a project management startup whose mission is to keep collaboration close to the code and make agile development accessible. We\u2019ve built an entire business with GitHub as, well, the hub. And even our shared customers \u2014 innovative companies like Shopify and Adobe are building their businesses in a way that puts GitHub at the center. It\u2019s a whole lot more powerful than building a business on Salesforce, the original SaaS platform play, and is the logical step amid the rise of tech-led rather than sales-led businesses.
Code as community is the key for GitHub to be a building block for business, but as it becomes easier and easier to build software, more like assembling components, these integrations will likely grow ever more diverse and important. So, too, will the spirit of transparency that GitHub supports, helping to break down knowledge silos within companies and to ensure that institutional knowledge doesn\u2019t leave when employees move on or change roles.
So it\u2019s no wonder that now the hottest topic among the Fortune 500 that have integrated GitHub is \u201cinner-sourcing,\u201d an approximation of open source within the walls of a company. And that\u2019s in large part to GitHub\u2019s credit. Bigger and bigger businesses see GitHub as a talent requirement, and as they bring in the platform, they\u2019re also starting to wake up to the other benefits of dev best practices.
But while the last decade has been defined by the rise of the API and the power to bring, build, or customize whatever tools you like, I think the next evolution in the infrastructure layer \u2014 and what will make GitHub even more mainstream \u2014 is the data underpinning it, with more than 80 million projects\u2019 worth of insights. GitHub\u2019s given us some previews of its intentions here, with project recommendations based on past activity (the \u201cexplore\u201d tab), security warnings based on project dependencies, and recommended code reviewers based on who has worked in the code being changed in a pull request.
After all, when people and organizations give data to a system, they expect to get something in return. In the future, it won\u2019t be enough that GitHub is just a great version control system. Their success will be determined by how they help make sense of the data that teams provide them with and translate those into insights for the team. If history is a guide, that\u2019s likely a theme GitHub is likely to look to its partner community to help bolster, which is why we\u2019ve been thinking about a lot of late as well: How we can give teams actionable info that helps them improve processes, further collaboration, and build better, faster, stronger teams.
These are areas where GitHub has the power to really guide and protect how work is done by leveraging its massive network effects. So it\u2019ll be GitHub and its advances in data that ultimately drive how software is written.
And as GitHub and its integration partners like us start making the platform easier for non-tech people, then we\u2019ll really start to unlock the power of the platform they\u2019ve built. They\u2019ve taken steps toward this by adding support for file formats used by designers, creating features for classrooms to make it more accessible for students and teachers, and even lowering the barriers to coding by releasing Atom (an easy-to-use code editor) and GitHub Desktop (a git client), both of which make it easier for non-technical people to contribute. Already, we use GitHub for things that aren\u2019t related to code, with hiring repos and marketing plans. In many ways, this evolution mirrors the work GitHub did years ago to make open source more accessible and discoverable.
So source code management might be a winner-take-all market, or it might not. Either way, GitHub is in the driver\u2019s seat because of its power to connect and transform work. I\u2019m excited for the trip.
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