My 12 year journey in software collaboration

This week, I'm reflecting on a post I wrote in May 2013 after one month of working at GitHub.

This past Monday marked my first month at GitHub. It’s been an amazing experience. Instead of writing a long post, I’m going to try to boil it down to some of the highlights.

I joined a new team with Jon Hoyt. I’ll be working on business tools for the GitHub business folks, starting with solving problems for the amazing finance team.

There are so many smart, talented, funny, and fun-to-be-around people at GitHub. It’s one hell of a superhero team.

I’ve attended more baseball games in the last month than in the last 26 years of my life. The Giants are now my west coast team. (I still hold a special place in my heart for the Red Sox, though.)

Everything you hear GitHub speak about is entirely true. One of my biggest questions when interviewing was “what’s the catch?” Thus far, it’s even better than it appears on the outside.

My programming ability is improving at an incredible velocity. Everyone wants to help you, your code, your application, and your team ship beautiful code. (Emphasis on the ship.)

I’m excited to see where my first year takes me. This is going to be one hell of a year.

After 12 years at GitHub, one thing hasn’t changed: collaboration. I still get to work with some of the smartest, funniest, and most creative people around. We ship everything from GitHub Universe to hackathons, game jams, 3D printed Copilot heads, and wild demos. Sure, we don’t have our old seats at the Giants games anymore, but between Slack banter, Zoom calls, and meetups in our rebuilt San Francisco HQ, that same energy is still alive.

If you told me 12 years ago I’d still be here, in this role, working with millions of developers around the world, I probably would have laughed. It would have seemed impossible. Yet here we are, getting ready for our 11th GitHub Universe. I’ve been part of every single one, and the magic of collaboration still hits just as hard.

In this new era of AI and agents, the loop from idea to execution to feedback has never been faster, but we can still speed it up. Because at the end of the day, the best part of building together is seeing everyone’s reaction when they finally get to experience what you’ve made. I'll see you at GitHub Universe on Tuesday, October 28th at 9:00 AM PT.