Portfolio of Keith Elder

Github Enterprise

by Keith Elder

How GitHub Came to our Company

One day in November 2008, I found a presentation Linus Torvalds (creator of git), gave at Google on how and why he created git. I was intrigued because Linus created the Linux operating system. I knew he had very distinctive use cases he was trying to address with distributed source control.

At the time we were using a mixture of CVS, SVN and TFS for source control. I knew using multiple version controls systems was not a good thing.

Where things were stored:

The problem we had internally:

After watching that presentation I was lead to GitHub.Com and created an account.

my gh account

Over the next month or so I started working with GitHub and our procurement team to bring GitHub Enterprise into the company.

Getting Adoption

We first launched GitHub with 50 licenses to cover teams that wanted to move to it right away (our Core team, and the front-end web teams). During this time there was a big push internally to use Team Foundation Server for everything. And by everything, I mean everything, including forcing engineers to put their source control in it. While .NET engineers didn't mind, every other technology stack did not want to put code in TFS. I didn't either. I had seen the light and power of distributed source control.

Every month GitHub usage increased as we seemed to be ordering more and more licenses. Adoption grew large enough to where the Key Masters took over maintenance of GitHub Enterprise and over licensing. They set it up to be more distributed and reliable internally for us.

Adoption continued to grow slowly because of the curve of learning git. Over the next few years source control was not centralized internally as some .NET teams were still using TFS, while others teams used GitHub.

On June 4, 2018, almost ten years later, Microsoft purchased GitHub for $7.5 billion. After that, it became the defacto place all source code should live.