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GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath To Step Down After Finding Replacement (forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad)
264 points by ahmedfromtunis on Aug 18, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments



Random story about Chris...

I saw him speak at a startup event in 2010 at MIT called Startup Bootcamp. It was probably my first startup-related conference and he was the first talk in the kick off slot at 9am. He gave a great talk recapping the origin of GitHub and how it grew out of another projected called FamSpam, a social network for families.

After the talk I had to run to the restroom and happened to run into Chris out in the entry way. I introduce myself and we starting chatting. As we were talking, people started walking into the event late. They saw us standing in the entrance, and started asking questions on where to go.

Instead of deferring responsibility to someone working at the event, Chris sat down at the empty welcome table and started checking people in by giving them schedules and helping them create name tags. We ended up checking in a few dozen people together while we talked more. No one knew who Chris was when they walked in, and just assumed he was a member of the event staff. I think had they known he was the co-founder of GitHub they probably would have paid more attention to him.

I ended up sending him a t-shirt and he took the time to shoot me back an email saying thanks. The subject line was "Dude" and the text was "Got the shirt. It's so awesome. You rock. Tell your brother yo, too!"

Anyways, I just thought it was kind of cool he took it upon himself to help out with checking people in at the event even though he had volunteered to travel all the way to Boston to speak for free to help out young, aspiring entrepreneurs by sharing his learnings. It always kind of stuck with me that you need to stay down to earth and pay it forward no matter how successful you get.


Brother Andy. I read this article and before clicking into the comments I started drafting an email to you with a link to it: "Hey, didn't we send Chris a t-shirt and he sent us back some dino stickers or something? I remember him being awesome."

Yo Chris!


Funny that we're catching up on this story here instead of in person or on the phone, Brother Alex.

HN, bringing families together since 2007.


Heh yeah this is typical Chris. Excited that he might code again. Him and ErrTheBlog were such a huge asset to the early Rails community. Also if it weren't for Chris and his vision, we'd still be using Subversion. I remember him trying to convince me to switch to git. I told him that it needed to be 10x better than SVN. Git by itself wasn't, but Github was. Github was to git what Rails was to Ruby.


Nice story but, I couldn't concentrate cause inside my head was this crazy person yelling: 'WHEN IS HE GONNA PEE!'


Don't fret, I eventually got there.


That's a great little anecdote. Thanks for sharing.


Yeah Chris is cool. He once personally answered some random minor UI suggestion I sent into support@github.


Github is among the best things that ever happened to OSS. Compared to anything that came before, it is a pleasure to browse, it is intuitive, and it has managed to corral millions of people with vastly different backgrounds into a golden age of OSS productivity.

In the 10 years+ before Github, I never even tried to contribute code–each project had its own workflow, and sending an email somehow felt intimidating. Today, spending an hour here or there to improve it slightly has almost become a guilty pleasure.

So, I guess what I'm saying is: Thank you!


Forbes is ad-infested hell, here is an Outline link:

https://outline.com/mntwGu


Thanks, forbes didn't remove the blurry overlay even after disabling umatrix.


I disabled JS on Forbes and the experience has been great since.


Woah. This is an amazing tool. They should make a browser that just does this by default.


Firefox -> View -> Enter Reader View


Brave Browser will take care of the ads and other bloat.


High sierra safari will have that afaik


Desktop Safari has had reader mode since at least 2014.


High Sierra allows you to default to reader view for any site you want. Before you had to enable reader view each time you visited.


Thanks forgot to add that.

The return to simplicity??


It's not a legitimate tool, it's copyright violation.


Is google cache also a copyright violation? What about the internet archive? Or do you mean just because they choose not to display certain elements it is a copyright violation? What about just not running javascript?


I guess the op was referring to storing the content which I am not sure if outline is doing. If the save the content and make it searchable then it is kinda violation to take away unique content.


Google cache does exactly that


Google cache does not transform the content.


There's no copyright violation by a browser refusing to load obnoxious css elements... it's more akin to an adblocker also blocking objoxious garbage.


When I was at GitHub Satellite last year in Amsterdam, I saw Chris walk in to the venue and look around at the amazing production and smile. You could tell how proud he was of his team and the brand he helped create. I am glad to see he is staying with the company, I'm sure the new CEO will need his advice from time to time to keep GitHub great for the next 10 years.


Why the title change? As far as I can tell, it's factually incorrect, as well.

Wanstrath is planning on stepping down and hasn't stepped down yet.


Any other way of viewing this story? On my iPad with Focus, I just get a blurred out screen when I visit Forbes.com now. I remember it used to show a 'please turn off your ad blocker' dismissible splash screen, but that seems to not be the case any more.


Not from Forbes but it should be readable:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/17/github-ceo-chris-wanstrath-i...

I seriously believe that Forbes is playing a game of trying to build the worst website in existence.


I'd believe it.

It's getting worse + worse. I'm adding it to my list of undreadables...


Like many content websites these days, Forbes loads in well under a second and is a great website if you disable javascript. I use "Quick Javascript Switcher" in Chrome, which just toggles javascript per-domain.

I'm not sure there's a way to do this on iOS, though, so I'm not sure if this helps you.


https://outline.com/mntwGu

This one displays nicely without an of the ad crap....

[ Credit : @forgingahead elsewhere in this thread ]


For your consideration: long press the refresh button in Mobile Safari and tap "Reload Without Content Blockers."


I view it through emacs-w3m, where it's perfectly readable.

Not sure if you can run emacs on an iPad, though.


Interesting.... works in lynx for me.

TIL! Thanks


On desktop Safari with Ghostery, the blurred screen went away after about 10 seconds and it redirected to the actual article.


I use Firefox mobile and always switch to reader mode which fixes it. I wish you could just turn reader mode on for the whole web.



I've never met the guy but have a ton of respect for his work - his open source projects like Resque and pjax were awesome for their time. I imagine GitHub has benefited a lot from having real coders at the helm for so long.


> Wanstrath plans to focus on product strategy and the GitHub community after stepping down from the CEO role, working directly on products and meeting with customers.

Just a theory, perhaps they bringing in a new professional CEO for an IPO?


> GitHub may seek to become more of a marketplace that can help developers show off their work and take on additional projects, with GitHub taking a portion as a fee, says Sequoia investor Jim Goetz.

They already have a Marketplace offering.


Chris is one of the few well-known developers who conveys a deep love of software engineering. Looking forward to reading some of the code he writes in the coming months.


The title is misleading. He plans to, but hasn't!


[flagged]


i feel as if your comment could contribute to the discussion but the tone is inflammatory. maybe something like "I'd like to see the new CEO focus more on the core business and product and not push some company culture agenda; its stifling their growth" This isn't reddit.


> This isn't reddit.

lol, this meme always cracks me up, particularly the implication that HN somehow represents the pristine halls of logical debate, even though comments like the one you're replying to are very common on this site regardless of the topic or political viewpoint. No... it's not reddit, it's actually quite quintessentially HN.


But that would require acknowledging that there's no evidence to support that claim.

(lol, never change HN, never change)


You may find that people who wish for companies to be toxic to white women and people of color in the name of growth are inherently inflammatory.


Wrong title


Defo throw away PHP man. It's 2017.




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