> What GitHub Gave Us

To me one of the clear things that GitHub gave us was a structure around a person rather than a project. To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name than it was to go through the (what felt to me) very serious process of coming up with a project name and reserving it on sourceforge just to get a cvs or svn repository (along with website, mailing lists, issue tracking(?), etc, etc...). It felt like the mental load of "oh this is just a quick thing" was a lot easier with github.

> It gave projects issue trackers, pull requests, release pages, wikis, organization pages, API access, webhooks, and later CI.

Although it didn't give us this all at once. I still remember when we created a new user account in order to simulate an organisation, before they existed. I distinctly recall discussing with friends if we wanted to set up a bug tracker software for our project with the assumption that "GitHub will probably release one in a few months anyway". In the end we just kept a text file committed in the repository. Issues were announced a few months later.

>To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name

If I remember correctly, it was also one of the few places sticking to the now-standard passing of the parameters via path rather than the '?' URL query part.

It might not seem like much now, but then the ease and simple beauty of having just github.com/user/repo - not only for web access but also cloning - was definitely some freshness factor.

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