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Chris Wanstrath

From Code Enthusiast to Tech Titan: Chris Wanstrath Journey

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In partnership with Tom Preston-Werner and PJ Hyett, executive chairman Chris Wanstrath along with other software engineers launched GitHub in 2008 based in San Francisco.

Having over twenty-four million user accounts, the firm has expanded into the biggest hosting service provider for software programs over the globe in a decade. The previous year, GitHub informed CNBC that it had been on the path to bringing in $200 million in subscription income annually.

Chris Wanstrath
Image Source: cnbc.com

While GitHub was estimated at 2 billion USD in 2016, Forbes assessed Wanstrath’s total value to be 360 million USD. Wanstrath’s financial assets will probably increase in addition after the sale is completed because Microsoft’s purchase of the business is expected to almost quadruple that.

In a blog post, Wanstrath wrote that he “could have never imagined” the Microsoft acquisition when GitHub launched 10 years ago. ”[GitHub] was a powerful but niche tool, clouds were just things in the sky, and Microsoft was a very different company,” he said.

Source: cnbc.com

Chris Wanstrath attempted to teach himself software programming while still, a young child growing up in Ohio. He wished to create websites & video games as a software developer. In 2017, he stated to Entrepreneur that He had always desired to be a member of a team creating products that others love.

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Wanstrath still had a passion for computers in the early years of the 2000s, but he changed his University of Cincinnati degree to English.

He still desired a career as a software engineer.

He enrolled in a few computer programming courses, which assisted him to become seriously interested in software development to the point where he thought he could make a living at it.

Chris Wanstrath received a job offer from the tech website CNET owned by CBS in 2005 after around two years of education.

Wanstrath was concerned regarding his chances of success since he was a mostly self-taught coder. But he decided to leap. He dropped out of school and moved to San Francisco to work as a software developer.

In January 2008, Wanstrath and Preston-Werner released an exclusive beta edition of GitHub. The following month, they welcomed Wyett as the third co-founder. Wyett had previously worked at CNET on the Chowhound project alongside Wanstrath as an experienced software engineer.

According to a blog post, Wanstrath stated that GitHub’s beta version reached 2,000 members by March 2008. Just over a decade until Microsoft revealed the merger on Monday, GitHub began for public usage in April 2008. After the site became life, GitHub slowly gained popularity among developers, surpassing 100,000 registered users by July 2009.

Over the years, GitHub was named to CNBC’s Disruptor List five times, with CNBC noting that the site has “been described as a Facebook for developers because it encourages collaboration and interaction around code.”

Source: cnbc.com

Besides hosting coding projects for huge organizations like NASA as well as companies like IBM, Airbnb, and Spotify, GitHub is utilized by a billion software professionals worldwide.

Tom Preston-Werner : Co-founder of GitHub

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Almost every developer in the world has submitted at least one line of code or checked out for coding solutions on the social coding platform GitHub. GitHub is the largest online community of developers where they share programming code with other programmers to help them or seek help from them, to create better software. GitHub is among the fastest growing startups with having over 28 million users and 57 million repositories. It was founded by Tom Preston-Werner, a software developer, inventor and entrepreneur from America.

Early Life

Tom was born on 28 October 1979, in Dubuque, Iowa, US. He lost his father at an early age. His mother was a teacher and his step-father was an engineer. He did his schooling from Dubuque Senior High School and went to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, to pursue his higher education. During his college, he realised that he is more interested in computer programming than the subjects he was pursuing at college. So after studying for two years in the college, he decided to drop out of the course and focus on learning programming languages.

Career

After leaving the college, Tom started with many small coding projects, one of which was based on flash replacement technique. At that time the websites had a limited set of fonts available for the users. His flash replacement project allowed the users to use any font on any website.

Tom Preston-Werner
Image Source: flickr.com

Later in 2004, he came with a new project named as Gravatar. The concept behind it was to maintain a single avatar for dozens of other services. The project was a success, but, without a business model, it was not paying the way it was supposed to. Finally, in 2007, a company named Automattic acquired Gravatar.

In 2005, Tom moved to San Francisco and started working with Powerset. Eventually, Microsoft acquired Powerset in 2008, and, offered Preston-Werner a $300,000 bonus and stock options in the company. But he had already started working on GitHub project, so he declined the offer to focus on it.

Founding GitHub

Tom was always in the favour of documenting the software codes so that other developers can easily understand how the codes exactly work. Being an active contributor to the open-source developer and hacker culture he came across with the idea of an open-source development community. Also, with the bad experience of the business with Gravatar, this time he was ready with a better business architecture for his new project. In 2008, he founded GitHub with his co-founders Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett and Scott Chacon. He had met Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett on one of the developer meet-up in San Francisco. GitHub was a commercial success and gained over 46,000 public repositories, in the initial year of its being online. Tom was appointed as the CEO of the company.

In 2014, Tom resigned from the company after he and his wife were accused of harassment by GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath.

After resigning from GitHub, Tom co-founded Chatterbug and Codestarter. Codestarter is a non-profit organization that donates computers to kid coders. He works as the advisor at Codestarter.

Personal Life

Preston-Werner is married to Theresa Preston-Werner, an anthropologist, known for her involvement in much historical research and social subjects.