GitHub turns five, boasts 3.5 million users

If you're a programmer of some kind, then you're undoubtedly familiar with GitHub, an online collaboration website that allows programmers to share and collaborate on open source projects. The site turned five years old today, and the founders announced that GitHub has 3.5 million users with over 6 million repositories.

In a short-and-sweet blog post from the three founders of GitHub, they note that 6,000 users were signed up with the website when it first launched five years ago, and it was home to just 2,500 repositories at the time. That number has since grown tremendously, obviously, but it shows how far the service has come in just five short years.

GitHub reached the one-million-user mark back in September of 2011, and three million users were gained in January of this year, meaning that 500,000 new users signed up for GitHub in just a matter of months. The site was co-founded by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett back in 2008, and now Github employs over 150 people.

Not only is GitHub a great place to share your open source creations and to collaborate with other programmers, but you can also use GitHub to receive feedback on your products. Users can ask for reviews, comment on lines of code, report issues, and even ask other users about ideas that they have and attempt to turn them into a reality.

[via The Next Web]