A few years ago, if you asked a developer about GitHub (or Bitbucket), you’d likely get a clear answer: “I don’t know about it”. GitHub didn’t even exist. Today, the collaborative code repository with the octocat logo has become almost indispensable in a developer’s daily work.

Founded in 2008 in an office in Silicon Valley (like so many other projects), GitHub now has more than 9 million registered users, over 200 million visits per month, and has been valued at more than $2 billion (earning it a spot on Fortune’s Unicorn List). From Google to the White House, Facebook, and even Madrid’s City Council, organizations rely on GitHub to manage and store their code. In the following lines, we’ll take a look back at GitHub’s history and try to shed some light on its meteoric success.

Another interesting post about GitHub: Seven Ways To Use GitHub That Aren’t Coding.

**This post is not original; its source is Xataka.