Simon Willison’s Weblog

How did GitHub get its initial contributors?

8th December 2013

My answer to How did GitHub get its initial contributors? on Quora

The founders were active participants in the open source and Ruby on Rails communities. The first users were people they knew in those communities (GitHub accounts were invite only at first).

Posted 8th December 2013 at 3:03 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Hacking the WiFi-enabled color screen GitHub Universe conference badge - 28th October 2025
Video: Building a tool to copy-paste share terminal sessions using Claude Code for web - 23rd October 2025
Dane Stuckey (OpenAI CISO) on prompt injection risks for ChatGPT Atlas - 22nd October 2025

This is How did GitHub get its initial contributors? by Simon Willison, posted on 8th December 2013.

github 172 startups 190 quora 1005

Next: What do Twitter and Gawker think of hash-bangs URLs?

Previous: Why does TED refer to its speeches as "talks"?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe