Chris Wanstrath

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Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

As Dubugras said, if you know a lot about what you’re talking about, they will take you seriously regardless of age. In the next chapter, we will look at the role that education plays in the success of billion-dollar startup founders. 2 MYTHS AROUND FOUNDERS’ EDUCATION ON DROPPING OUT It took only two years at the University of Cincinnati for Chris Wanstrath to get bored with school. He’d been working toward an English degree, but he spent more time coding than going to class. Wanstrath loved video games, and a few computer programming classes in college gave him enough of a tool kit to start learning how to code games himself. By his sophomore year, he’d gotten pretty good.

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I very purposefully wanted to work on a side project that, unlike Gravatar, if it became successful, would be something that I could work on full-time and have it pay for me to do that. So initially GitHub was a side project. It was just something that I started working on. I knew some other Ruby programmers through a user’s group that we put together, and we would meet every two weeks at someone’s office, and there’d be some technical talk for maybe an hour. I got to know Chris Wanstrath [the other co-founder of GitHub] through that group, and I’d always admired his work. He was doing consulting and had put out a bunch of open-source libraries that a lot of people used. I thought that was pretty awesome. I thought it would be pretty cool to work on something with him. And so after one of these meetups I sat him down and I showed him what I was working on.

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Angela Gratela, “Meet the 18 Original Founders of Alibaba,” E27, October 19, 2018, https://e27.co/meet-18-original-founders-alibaba-20181019/. CHAPTER 2: MYTHS AROUND FOUNDERS’ EDUCATION 1. Tom Huddleston, “How This 33-Year-Old College Dropout Co-Founded GitHub, Which Just Sold to Microsoft for $7.5 Billion,” CNBC, June 4, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/06/04/chris-wanstrath-co-founded-github-which-microsoft-bought-for-billions.html. 2. “Number of People with Master’s and Doctoral Degrees Doubles Since 2000,” United States Census Bureau, February 2019, www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-people-with-masters-and-phd-degrees-double-since-2000.html. CHAPTER 3: MYTHS AROUND FOUNDERS’ WORK EXPERIENCE 1.

Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby: Control Your Computer, Simplify Your Life by David B. Copeland

business logic, Chris Wanstrath, Compatible Time-Sharing System, database schema, en.wikipedia.org, full stack developer, machine readable, Multics, Ruby on Rails, systems thinking, web application

They include Paul Barry, Daniel Bretoi, Trevor Burnham, Ian Dees, Avdi Grimm, Wynn Netherland, Staffan Nöteberg, Noel Rappin, Eric Sendlebach, Christopher Sexton, and Matt Wynne. Finally, I’d like to thank the many programmers who’ve contributed to the open source projects I mention in the book, including, but probably not limited to, the following: Aslak Hellesøy, TJ Holowaychuk, Ara Howard, Yehuda Katz, James Mead, William Morgan, Ryan Tomayko, Chris Wanstrath, and, of course Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, who created such a wonderful language in which to write command-line apps. With all that being said, let’s get down to business and start making our command-line apps a lot more awesome! Footnotes [1] http://pragprog.com/book/dccar/build-awesome-command-line-applications-in-ruby [2] http://gembundler.com [3] http://beginrescueend.com [4] http://www.cygwin.com/ [5] http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS [6] http://rubyinstaller.org/ [7] http://rubykoans.com/ [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding [9] http://pragprog.com/titles/dccar [10] http://forums.pragprog.com/forums/190 Copyright © 2012, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

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Even if man could access your app’s files, creating a man page is no small feat; it requires using the nroff[20] format, which is cumbersome to use for writing documentation. Fortunately, the Ruby ecosystem of open source libraries has us covered. gem-man,[21] a plug-in to RubyGems created by GitHub’s Chris Wanstrath, allows users to access man pages bundled inside a gem via the gem man command. ronn [22] is a Ruby app that allows us to create man pages in plain text, without having to learn nroff. We can use these two tools together to create a manual page that we can easily distribute with our app and that will be easily accessible to our users.

Pro Git by Scott Chacon

Chris Wanstrath, continuous integration, creative destruction, Debian, distributed revision control, GnuPG, pull request, revision control, systems thinking

(In Git versions 1.6.1 and later, you can also use git diff --staged, which may be easier to remember.) This command compares your staged changes to your last commit: $ git diff --cached diff --git a/README b/README new file mode 100644 index 0000000..03902a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/README2 @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +grit + by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath + http://github.com/mojombo/grit + +Grit is a Ruby library for extracting information from a Git repository It’s important to note that git diff by itself doesn’t show all changes made since your last commit — only changes that are still unstaged. This can be confusing, because if you’ve staged all of your changes, git diff will give you no output.

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A nice way of quickly getting a sort of changelog of what has been added to your project since your last release or e-mail is to use the git shortlog command. It summarizes all the commits in the range you give it; for example, the following gives you a summary of all the commits since your last release, if your last release was named v1.0.1: $ git shortlog --no-merges master --not v1.0.1 Chris Wanstrath (8): Add support for annotated tags to Grit::Tag Add packed-refs annotated tag support. Add Grit::Commit#to_patch Update version and History.txt Remove stray `puts` Make ls_tree ignore nils Tom Preston-Werner (4): fix dates in history dynamic version method Version bump to 1.0.2 Regenerated gemspec for version 1.0.2 You get a clean summary of all the commits since v1.0.1, grouped by author, that you can e-mail to your list.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Now imagine that the best programmers in the world from everywhere—either working for companies or just looking for a little recognition—are all doing the same thing. You end up with a virtuous cycle for the rapid learning and improving of software programs that drives innovation faster and faster. Originally founded by three grade-A geeks—Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and P. J. Hyett—GitHub is now the world’s largest code host. Since I could not visit any major company today without finding programmers using the GitHub platform to collaborate, I decided I had to visit the source of so much source code at its San Francisco headquarters. By coincidence, I had just interviewed President Barack Obama in the Oval Office about Iran a week earlier.

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By coincidence, I had just interviewed President Barack Obama in the Oval Office about Iran a week earlier. I say that only because the visitor lobby at GitHub is an exact replica of the Oval Office, right down to the carpet! They like to make their guests feel special. My host, GitHub’s CEO, Chris Wanstrath, began by telling me how the “Git” got into GitHub. Git, he explained, is a “distributed version control system” that was invented in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, one of the great and somewhat unsung innovators of our time. Torvalds is the open-source evangelist who created Linux, the first open-source operating system that competed head-to-head with Microsoft Windows.

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At Walmart, Doug McMillon, Neil Ashe, Dan Toporek, and their colleagues showed me in exacting detail every digital interaction that happened behind the scenes when I tried to buy a television from Walmart’s mobile app. They also introduced me to the best ribs in Arkansas. I am deeply indebted to Doug Cutting from Hadoop and Chris Wanstrath from GitHub for patiently walking me through the evolution of both of their companies and ensuring that I got every fact right. It took multiple visits and follow-ups with both for me to fully understand what they had each helped to create, and I am extremely grateful for their tutoring. Qualcomm’s cofounder Irwin Jacobs did the same on my two visits to his campus.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Celebrated—even recognized—or not, open source software runs the Internet (and thus the world) today. After that extraordinary initial success, the open source movement settled into a stable, stratified environment over much the last decade, with the community producing little in the way of new innovation. Everything changed in 2008, however, when Chris Wanstrath, P.J. Hyett and Tom Preston-Werner (all out of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator entrepreneurial incubator program) founded a company called GitHub. An open source coding and collaboration tool and platform, GitHub has utterly transformed the open source environment. It is a social network for programmers in which people and their collaborations are central, rather than just the code itself.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

For more context, in 2014, Astra Taylor and I co-wrote an essay for The Baffler on sexism and Silicon Valley, “The Dads of Tech.” The TechCrunch report “Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit” was authored by Alex Wilhelm and Alexia Tsotsis (March 18, 2014). GitHub hired a third-party investigator to look into Horvath’s allegations. Chris Wanstrath published the findings on the company blog on April 28, 2014 (“Follow up to the investigation results”). The investigator found that “Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub’s CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse’s presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office.”

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Howard, Rick Ifland, Verity Jones, Ben Keesey, Jess Kutch, Joseph Kvedar, Sheila Lirio Marcelo, Nancy Lublin, Brian Lynch, Benjamin Mako Hill, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Michelle Michael, Geoff Mulligan, Nehkara Nikki Newhouse, Rainer Nõlvak, Alex Pentland, John Pinette, Shael Polakow-Suransky, Ai-jen Poo, Katie Radford, Thomas Reese, Jay Rogers, Robin Sather, Nathan Schneider, Michael Silberman, James Slezak, Lara Stein, Courtnie Swearingen, Madelon van Tilburg, Eric Topol, Chris Wanstrath, David Weinberger, Paul Wicks, Rob Wijnberg, David Willey. Most of all, we want to thank the many people we have never met who have already engaged with this thinking, improved it, and used it in their own work to make more people more powerful. * * * — Henry wants to thank: My colleagues and the board of directors at the 92nd Street Y for their support and encouragement throughout the process.

Node.js in Action by Mike Cantelon, Marc Harter, Tj Holowaychuk, Nathan Rajlich

Amazon Web Services, business logic, Chris Wanstrath, create, read, update, delete, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Google Chrome, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, node package manager, p-value, pull request, Ruby on Rails, SQL injection, web application, WebSocket

Using the Mustache templating language with Hogan Hogan.js (https://github.com/twitter/hogan.js) is a template engine that was created by Twitter for its templating needs. Hogan is an implementation of the popular Mustache (http://mustache.github.com/) template language standard, which was created by GitHub’s Chris Wanstrath. Mustache takes a minimalist approach to templating. Unlike EJS, the Mustache standard deliberately doesn’t include conditional logic, nor any built-in content-filtering capabilities other than escaping content to prevent XSS attacks. Mustache advocates that template code should be kept as simple as possible.

Pro Git by Scott Chacon, Ben Straub

Chris Wanstrath, continuous integration, creative destruction, Debian, distributed revision control, GnuPG, pull request, remote working, revision control, systems thinking, web application

A nice way of quickly getting a sort of changelog of what has been added to your project since your last release or e-mail is to use the git shortlog command. It summarizes all the commits in the range you give it; for example, the following gives you a summary of all the commits since your last release, if your last release was named v1.0.1: $ git shortlog --no-merges master --not v1.0.1 Chris Wanstrath (8): Add support for annotated tags to Grit::Tag Add packed-refs annotated tag support. Add Grit::Commit#to_patch Update version and History.txt Remove stray `puts` Make ls_tree ignore nils Tom Preston-Werner (4): fix dates in history dynamic version method Version bump to 1.0.2 Regenerated gemspec for version 1.0.2 You get a clean summary of all the commits since v1.0.1, grouped by author, that you can e-mail to your list.