Tom Preston-Werner

Last updated

Tom Preston-Werner
Tom Preston-Werner (2024).jpg
Born (1979-05-27) May 27, 1979 (age 45)
Dubuque, Iowa, U.S.
Alma mater Harvey Mudd College (dropped out)
Occupation(s) Software developer, entrepreneur
Years active2008–present
TitleCo-founder & former CEO, GitHub
Term2012-2014
Predecessor Chris Wanstrath
Successor Chris Wanstrath
SpouseTheresa Preston-Werner [1] [2]
Children3
Website tom.preston-werner.com

Thomas Preston-Werner (born May 27, 1979) is an American billionaire software developer and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the free and open-source software community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives.

Contents

He is best known as the founder and former CEO of GitHub, a Git repository web-based hosting service, which he co-founded in 2008 with Chris Wanstrath and P. J. Hyett. [3] He resigned from GitHub in 2014 when an internal investigation concluded that he and his wife harassed an employee. [4] Preston-Werner is also the creator of the avatar service Gravatar, [5] the TOML configuration file format, [6] the static site generator software Jekyll, [7] [8] and the Semantic Versioning Specification (SemVer). [9] As of 2023, he and his wife have committed to The Giving Pledge—a promise to give away or donate a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. [10]

Early life

Preston-Werner grew up in Dubuque, Iowa. His father died when he was a child. His mother was a teacher and his stepfather was an engineer. [11]

He graduated from high school at Dubuque Senior High School and attended Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California for 2 years before dropping out to pursue other endeavours. [11]

Influence

As an active contributor to the open-source developer and hacker culture, most prominently in areas involving the programming language Ruby, [12] he has written articles regarding his philosophies and opinions on various issues. He has been featured as a guest on podcasts, including Rubyology and SitePoint. [13]

Preston was one of the initial members of the San Francisco group IcanhazRuby or ICHR[ when? ], after he became a regular member of the San Francisco Ruby Meetups. He continued until the meetings became overwhelmed by venture capital investors searching for talent; this prompted him to seek more private gatherings. [12]

Preston-Werner is the creator of the TOML configuration file format. [14]

Career

In an article published by Hacker Monthly in 2010, Preston wrote about his passion for ensuring that developers document the code they write so others can easily understand how it works. [15]

In 2004, Preston-Werner founded Gravatar, a service for providing globally unique avatars that follow users from site to site. Preston-Werner sold the company to Automattic in 2007. [16] In 2005 he moved to San Francisco to work at Powerset, a natural language search engine. Powerset was acquired by Microsoft. Preston-Werner declined a $300,000 bonus and stock options from Microsoft so that he could focus on GitHub. [11]

GitHub

Preston-Werner co-founded GitHub in 2008 with Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett and Scott Chacon, as a place to share and collaborate on code. [17]

In 2010, Preston-Werner read a comment on Twitter insulting the quality of GitHub's search function. This prompted him to overhaul the service's search, drawing on his experience having worked at Powerset. [12]

Resignation from GitHub

Julie Ann Horvath, a GitHub programmer, alleged in March 2014 that Tom Preston-Werner and his wife Theresa had engaged in a pattern of harassment against her that led her to leave the company. [18] [19] GitHub initially denied Horvath's allegations, [20] [21] [22] then following an internal investigation, confirmed some of the claims. Preston-Werner resigned. GitHub's new CEO Chris Wanstrath said the "investigation found 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." [4]

After GitHub

Following his resignation from GitHub, Preston-Werner sold his shares in the company to Microsoft. [23] Along with a team of former GitHub co-founders and executives, Preston-Werner then cofounded Chatterbug, a software for language-learning. [24] In 2018, Chatterbug cofounder Scott Chacon announced an $8 million (~$9.56 million in 2023) series A funding round for the company, financed by himself and Preston-Werner. [25] Preston-Werner, a hacker himself, has hosted AMA-style events for student hackers, such as for Hack Club, [26] at the Def Hacks Virtual 2020 hackathon, and Dubhacks 2020. [27] [28] [29]

Personal life

Preston-Werner lives in San Francisco with his wife Theresa and their sons. [1] [5]

His wife is a former graduate student in cultural anthropology known for her involvement in historical research and social subjects. [30] [31]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nat Friedman</span> American technology executive and investor

Nathaniel Dourif Friedman is an American technology executive and investor. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of GitHub and former chairman of the GNOME Foundation. Friedman is currently a board member at the Arc Institute and an advisor of Midjourney.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gravatar</span> Web service providing individuals with a "Globally Recognized Avatar"

Gravatar is a service for providing globally unique avatars and was created by Tom Preston-Werner. Since 2007, it has been owned by Automattic, having integrated it into their WordPress.com blogging platform.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Hub</span> Public directory of free and open source software (FOSS)

Open Hub or Black Duck Open Hub is a website which provides a web services suite and online community platform that aims to index the open-source software development community. It was founded by former Microsoft managers Jason Allen and Scott Collison in 2004 and joined by the developer Robin Luckey. As of 15 January 2016, the site lists 669,601 open-source projects, 681,345 source control repositories, 3,848,524 contributors and 31,688,426,179 lines of code.

Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GitHub</span> Software development collaboration platform

GitHub is a proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.

Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages. As one of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now also supports Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go. For this reason, Heroku is said to be a polyglot platform as it has features for a developer to build, run and scale applications in a similar manner across most of these languages. Heroku was acquired by Salesforce in 2010 for $212 million.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jekyll (software)</span> Ruby-based static website generator

Jekyll is a static site generator written in Ruby by Tom Preston-Werner. It is distributed under the open source MIT license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atom (text editor)</span> Free and open-source text and source code editor

Atom is a free and open-source text and source-code editor for macOS, Linux, and Windows with support for plug-ins written in JavaScript, and embedded Git control. Developed by GitHub, Atom was released on June 25, 2015.

A bug bounty program is a deal offered by many websites, organizations, and software developers by which individuals can receive recognition and compensation for reporting bugs, especially those pertaining to security exploits and vulnerabilities.

Wire Swiss GmbH is a software company with headquarters in Zug, Switzerland. Its development center is in Berlin, Germany. The company is best known for its messaging application called Wire.

The software development platform GitHub has been the target of censorship from governments using methods ranging from local Internet service provider blocks, intermediary blocking using methods such as DNS hijacking and man-in-the-middle attacks, and denial-of-service attacks on its servers from countries including China, India, Iraq, Russia, and Turkey. In all of these cases, GitHub has been eventually unblocked after backlash from users and technology businesses or compliance from GitHub.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span> Software developer and open source advocate

Coraline Ada Ehmke is an American software developer, open source advocate, and Founder and Executive Director of the Organization for Ethical Source, based in Chicago, Illinois. She began her career as a web developer in 1994 and has worked in a variety of industries, including engineering, consulting, education, advertising, healthcare, and software development infrastructure. She is known for her work in Ruby, and in 2016 earned the Ruby Hero award at RailsConf, a conference for Ruby on Rails developers. She is also known for her social justice work and activism, writing the Contributor Covenant and Post-Meritocracy Manifesto, and promoting the widespread adoption of codes of conduct for open source projects and communities.

This is a timeline of GitHub, a web-based Git or version control repository and Internet hosting service.

Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language is a file format for configuration files. It is intended to be easy to read and write due to obvious semantics which aim to be "minimal", and it is designed to map unambiguously to a dictionary. Originally created by Tom Preston-Werner, its specification is open source. TOML is used in a number of software projects and is implemented in many programming languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Wanstrath</span> American technology entrepreneur and co-founder and former CEO of GitHub

Chris Wanstrath is an American technology entrepreneur and programmer. He is the founder of Null Games, and the co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. Wanstrath co-founded GitHub in 2008 and sold it to Microsoft in 2018. Before starting GitHub, he worked with CNET on GameSpot and Chowhound. In addition to GitHub, he created the Atom text editor, Ruby's Resque job queue, the Mustache templating language, and the pjax JavaScript library. According to Forbes his net worth is estimated at US$1.8-2.2 billion and is listed in America's richest entrepreneurs under 40, as well as Fortune's 40 under 40 and he was named in CNBC's Disruptor 50 list.

The Contributor Covenant is a code of conduct for contributors to free/open source software projects, created by Coraline Ada Ehmke. Its stated purpose is to reduce harassment of minority, LGBT and otherwise underrepresented open source software developers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">P. J. Hyett</span> American software developer and co-founder of GitHub (born 1983)

Phillip Jeffrey Hyett is an American software developer, technology entrepreneur, and a co-founder of GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git, which he created with Tom Preston-Werner and Chris Wanstrath in 2008.

Microsoft, a tech company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hack Club</span> Nonprofit organization

Hack Club is a global nonprofit network of high school computer hackers, makers and coders founded in 2014 by Zach Latta. It now includes more than 500 high school clubs and 40,000 students. It has been featured on the TODAY Show, and profiled in the Wall Street Journal and many other publications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft and unions</span> Relationship between Microsoft and trade unions around the world

Microsoft recognizes 8 video game unions representing 2,000 video game workers. Microsoft like other tech companies, has historically resisted unions and relied on temporary workers with lower pay and job security than regular employees. This shift began in 2015 and accelerated in 2022 when Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard. To expedite the approval process, Microsoft signed a labor neutrality agreement with Communications Workers of America. This agreement guarantees that Microsoft will not interfere with or oppose union organizing efforts. It applies to both of its video game subsidiaries, Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax Media. Other unionization efforts at TaxSaver Software and Lionbridge have been unsuccessful.

References

  1. 1 2 Deamicis, Carmel (February 7, 2014). "This year at the Crunchies: Class tensions and tech-charity". PandoDaily . Archived from the original on December 6, 2020. Retrieved April 22, 2014.
  2. ↑ Preston-Werner, Tom (October 18, 2008). "How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub". Tom Preston-Werner. Archived from the original on April 13, 2021. Retrieved April 22, 2014.
  3. ↑ Etherington, Darrell (January 21, 2014). "GitHub President Becomes CEO, CEO Becomes President In Executive Role Swap". TechCrunch. AOL. Archived from the original on October 31, 2020. Retrieved June 25, 2017. GitHub has just announced that co-founder Tom Preston-Werner will be taking over the role of President from fellow co-founder Chris Wanstrath
  4. 1 2 "Follow up to the investigation results". GitHub . April 28, 2014. Archived from the original on March 22, 2021. Retrieved November 7, 2014.
  5. 1 2 "Tom Preston-Werner". Bloomberg Link. Bloomberg. Archived from the original on June 17, 2013. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  6. ↑ "GitHub - toml-lang/toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language". GitHub . September 26, 2021. Archived from the original on February 15, 2017. Retrieved September 5, 2019.
  7. ↑ Assar, Vijith (August 7, 2013). "The Software That Builds Software". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on January 16, 2021. Retrieved May 27, 2020.
  8. ↑ Orsini, Lauren (April 21, 2014). "What Tom Preston-Werner's Departure Means For GitHub". ReadWrite. Archived from the original on November 19, 2018. Retrieved May 27, 2020.
  9. ↑ Preston-Werner, Tom. "Semantic Versioning 2.0.0". Semantic Versioning. Archived from the original on April 9, 2021. Retrieved November 29, 2019.
  10. ↑ "Tom and Theresa Preston-Werner - the Giving Pledge". Archived from the original on September 27, 2023. Retrieved September 27, 2023.
  11. 1 2 3 Bourne, Will (February 27, 2013). "2 Reasons to Keep an Eye on GitHub". Inc. Archived from the original on February 25, 2021. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  12. 1 2 3 Randall Thomas (February 5, 2011). "S01E09: Tom Preston-Werner" (MP3). Engine Yard (Podcast) (Cloud Out Loud ed.). Event occurs at 42:35. Archived from the original on October 14, 2020. Retrieved October 21, 2014. The Ruby community and the way the Ruby community interacts is always kind of my model for how it should be done. * "S01E09: Tom Preston-Werner". Engine Yard. February 5, 2011. Archived from the original on October 22, 2014.
  13. ↑ Simoneau, Louis (April 9, 2011). "SitePoint Podcast #107: Social Coding with GitHub's Tom Preston-Werner". SitePoint. Archived from the original on March 26, 2020. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
  14. ↑ "TOML, Tom's Own Markup Language". Y Combinator Link. Y Combinator. Archived from the original on June 9, 2017. Retrieved May 10, 2017.
  15. ↑ Preston-Werner, Tom (October 2010). "Readme Driven Development" (PDF). Hacker Monthly (5): 22. Archived (PDF) from the original on January 5, 2015. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
  16. ↑ Aamoth, Doug (October 17, 2007). "Automattic Acquires Gravatar". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on October 19, 2007. Retrieved October 10, 2013.
  17. ↑ McMillan, Robert (February 21, 2012). "Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More)". Wired. Archived from the original on August 8, 2014. Retrieved October 10, 2013.
  18. ↑ Wilhelm, Alex (March 16, 2014). "Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism And Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit – TechCrunch". techcrunch.com. Archived from the original on June 11, 2018. Retrieved June 8, 2018.
  19. ↑ Biddle, Sam; Tiku, Nitasha (March 17, 2014). "Meet the Married Duo Behind Tech's Biggest New Harassment Scandal". Vallywag . Gawker. Archived from the original on March 17, 2014. Retrieved March 17, 2014.
  20. ↑ Wanstrath, Chris (April 21, 2014). "Results of the GitHub Investigation". The GitHub Blog. Archived from the original on June 6, 2018. Retrieved June 8, 2018.
  21. ↑ Miller, Claire Cain (April 21, 2014). "GitHub Founder Resigns After Investigation". Bits. The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 7, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2016.
  22. ↑ Wilhelm, Alex (April 21, 2014). "GitHub Denies Allegations Of "Gender-Based Harassment," Co-Founder Preston-Werner Resigns". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on March 22, 2021. Retrieved June 25, 2017.
  23. ↑ "Microsoft's Acquisition Of GitHub Mints New Billionaires". Forbes. June 4, 2018. Archived from the original on November 9, 2020. Retrieved June 13, 2018.
  24. ↑ "GitHub's scandalized ex-CEO returns with Chatterbug". October 21, 2017. Archived from the original on July 6, 2020. Retrieved May 7, 2020.
  25. ↑ "Why We're Investing $8M in the Future of Language Learning". June 27, 2019. Archived from the original on April 13, 2024. Retrieved May 7, 2020.
  26. ↑ @mojombo (April 23, 2020). "A few weeks ago I was the first guest speaker for the @HackClub AMA series. Now they're having @ElonMusk as a guest…" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  27. ↑ "DubHacks 2020". dubhacks.co. Archived from the original on October 19, 2020. Retrieved October 13, 2020.
  28. ↑ Def Hacks Virtual 2020. "AMA with Tom Preston-Werner". Youtube. Archived from the original on December 17, 2020. Retrieved August 22, 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  29. ↑ "Def Hacks Blog - June 20th, 2020". Archived from the original on September 23, 2020. Retrieved August 22, 2020.
  30. ↑ Heller, Nathan (July 7, 2014). "California Screaming". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on October 22, 2014. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
  31. ↑ "Journal of Folklore Research" (PDF). 2008. Archived from the original on November 9, 2014. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.