GitHub, the open source developer’s code repository of choice, now has 3 million developers on board. According to GitHub engineer Rob Sanheim made the announcement on the GitHub blog. “That’s three million developers building software better, together,” he said.
Launched in April 2008, GitHub celebrated its first million users in September 2011. The platform attracted a further two million users by August 2012, which means it has garnered an extra million developers in just five months to bring the total to three million registered users.
Not only has its tripled its user base in the corresponding 15 months, but it also raised $100 million in the summer when it announced its first ever investment, which came from Andreessen Horowitz. In addition, GitHub will soon see the 5 millionth repository being hosted any week now and puts its current number of repositories at 4.9 million.
To celebrate the phenomenal year GitHub has had, it is threw a party at Code Bass in San Francisco. The current success of the platform has demonstrated how increasingly important as well as easy it is becoming for developers to collaborate via the web. It has also set a benchmark on how to successfully monetize collaborative development platforms.
However, it hasn’t been plain-sailing for GitHub and the service suffered a number of service outages towards the end of 2012. Given its fast growing user base, the company needs to fix all the reliability issues, as the platform scales up.
GitHub’s rise in both the number of developers and the number of repositories it hosts, shows how online collaboration is becoming one of the most serious utilities of the web, and given the pace with which GitHub is getting bigger, it seems to be at the right place at the right time. However, we’ll have to keep a tab on how quickly it plugs the reliability issues, which are keeping larger enterprises from embracing the platform.
