The present, past and future of GitHub
The present, past and future of GitHubHow GitHub evolved from a Rails monolith, embraced remote work, why it hires more junior devs than ever before, and how GH Copilot was built thanks to a happy accident. With GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke
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— In This EpisodeGitHub recently turned 17 years old—but how did it start, how has it evolved, and what does the future look like as AI changes how developers work? In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined by Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub. Thomas has been a GitHub user for 16 years and an employee for 7. We talk about GitHub’s early architecture, its remote-first operating model, and how the company is navigating AI—from Copilot to agents. We also discuss why GitHub hires junior engineers, how the company handled product-market fit early on, and why being a beloved tool can make shipping harder at times. Other topics we discuss include:
 How GitHub built CopilotAn interesting quote from the episode is how and when GitHub started to build Copilot — during the pandemic, after getting access to GPT-3. And how it all started with a published paper:
We go into several more, previously unshared stories on the evolution of GitHub. The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episodeTimestamps(00:00) Intro (02:25) GitHub’s modern tech stack (08:11) From cloud-first to hybrid: How GitHub handles infrastructure (13:08) How GitHub’s remote-first culture shapes its operations (18:00) Former and current internal tools including Haystack (21:12) GitHub’s approach to security (24:30) The current size of GitHub, including security and engineering teams (25:03) GitHub’s intern program, and why they are hiring junior engineers (28:27) Why AI isn’t a replacement for junior engineers (34:40) A mini-history of GitHub (39:10) Why GitHub hit product market fit so quickly (43:44) The invention of pull requests (44:50) How GitHub enables offline work (46:21) How monetization has changed at GitHub since the acquisition (48:00) 2014 desktop application releases (52:10) The Microsoft acquisition (1:01:57) Behind the scenes of GitHub’s quiet period (1:06:42) The release of Copilot and its impact (1:14:14) Why GitHub decided to open-source Copilot extensions (1:20:01) AI agents and the myth of disappearing engineering jobs (1:26:36) Closing ReferencesWhere to find Thomas Dohmke: • X: https://x.com/ashtom • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashtom/ • GitHub: https://github.com/ashtom Mentions during the episode: • Ruby on Rails: https://rubyonrails.org/ • React: https://react.dev/ • Go: https://go.dev/ • Swift: https://www.swift.org/ • .NET: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/dotnet • Chris Wanstrath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/defunkt/ • PJ Hyett on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pjhyett/ • Tom Preston-Werner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mojombo/ • Scott Chacon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schacon/ • GitButler: https://gitbutler.com/ • Working at Amazon as a software engineer – with Dave Anderson: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/working-at-amazon-as-a-software-engineer • Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/ • MYSQL: https://www.mysql.com/ • Acquired | GitHub | Season 2, Episode 9: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-2-episode-9github • Loom: https://www.loom.com/ • Sentry: https://sentry.io/ • Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.com/ • Atom: https://atom-editor.cc/ • Heroku’s April 2022 Incident Review: https://www.heroku.com/blog/april-2022-incident-review/ • Mike Hanley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelphanley/ • GitHub Security Lab: https://securitylab.github.com/ • CodeQL: https://codeql.github.com/ • How Linux is built with Greg Kroah-Hartman: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-linux-is-built-with-greg-kroah • Two decades of Git: A conversation with creator Linus Torvalds:  • SourceForge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge • The Octocat: https://github.com/octocat • Bosch: https://www.bosch.com/ • RailsConf 09: Chris Wanstrath, "How to become a famous Rails Developer, Ruby Rockstar or Code Ninja":  • Mercurial: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/ • About pull requests: https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-pull-requests/proposing-changes-to-your-work-with-pull-requests/about-pull-requests • Oh yeah, there’s pull requests now: https://github.blog/news-insights/the-library/oh-yeah-there-s-pull-requests-now/ • VS Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/ • Nat Friedman on X: https://x.com/natfriedman • Satya Nadella on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satyanadella/ • 50 Years of Microsoft and Developer Tools with Scott Guthrie: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/50-years-of-microsoft • Jetbrains: https://www.jetbrains.com/ • JFrog: https://jfrog.com/ • Kevin Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkevinscott/ • Codex: https://openai.com/index/introducing-codex/ • Research: quantifying GitHub Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness: https://github.blog/news-insights/research/research-quantifying-github-copilots-impact-on-developer-productivity-and-happiness/ • Universe 2023: Copilot transforms GitHub into the AI-powered developer platform: https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/universe-2023-copilot-transforms-github-into-the-ai-powered-developer-platform/ • Copilot Extensions: https://github.com/copilot-extensions • Xcode: https://developer.apple.com/xcode/ • Jessica Deen on X: https://x.com/jldeen — Production and marketing by Pen Name. You’re on the free list for The Pragmatic Engineer. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. Many readers expense this newsletter within their company’s training/learning/development budget. If you have such a budget, here’s an email you could send to your manager. This post is public, so feel free to share and forward it. If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my book, The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Here is what Tanya Reilly, senior principal engineer and author of The Staff Engineer's Path said about it:
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