Before GitHub

Before GitHub written on April 28, 2026 GitHub was not the first home of my Open Source software. SourceForge was. Before GitHub, I had my own Trac installation. I had Subversion repositories, tickets, tarballs, and documentation on infrastructure I controlled. Later I moved projects to Bitbucket, back when Bitbucket still felt like a serious alternative place for Open Source projects, especially for people who were not all-in on Git yet. And then, eventually, GitHub became the place, and I moved all of it there. It is hard for me to overstate how important GitHub became in my life. A large part of my Open Source identity formed there. Projects I worked on found users there. People found me there, and I found other people there.

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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings.