Thomas Dohmke is taking over from Nat Friedman to become GitHub’s new CEO.
Dohmke co-founded HockeyApp – a service to help distribute beta versions of apps and get analytics and crash reports – in 2011, to solve some of his paint points as a developer.
He took this passion for solving pain points to GitHub in 2018 after leading Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub alongside Friedman.
In a blog post, Dohmke wrote:
“Leading the home for all developers, working more closely with all of you and the entire GitHub community, is truly a dream fulfilled.
I started coding in the late 1980s on a Robotron KC 87 and then on a Commodore 64.
I discovered Linux and the open source community while I was a student at The Technical University of Berlin.”
Notably, Dohmke led the work to make private repositories free. During his time as GitHub’s chief product officer, Dohmke launched new capabilities for products such as Codespaces, Issues, and Copilot that have cured more headaches for developers.
“I cannot wait to begin this journey as GitHub’s new CEO and continue to make GitHub better for all developers,” continues Dohmke.
“We will remain customer obsessed, working to support teams of all sizes and projects of all scopes—from students that are just learning to code, small and really big open source projects that span the globe, to the world’s largest enterprises.”
Dohmke promises that, under his leadership, GitHub will retain its developer-first values and continue to operate independently.
Friedman steps down a little over three years after becoming CEO of GitHub. He will become Chairman Emeritus at the company, which he says fulfills his “lifelong ambition of having a title in Latin.”
Under Friedman’s leadership, GitHub Actions has become the #1 CI service, Discussions is used by over half of the top 100 open source communities on the platform, and Sponsors is enabling developers to earn millions of dollars for their contributions.
Products such as Codespaces and Copilot are providing early glimpses at the future of software development while others – like GitHub Advanced Security and CodeQL, private repo secret scanning, Dependabot, and GitHub’s advisory database – are helping to secure the software supply chain when it’s never been more critical.
“I am confident in the GitHub team and Thomas to meet every new challenge and opportunity ahead,” wrote Friedman in his own blog post.
“Thank you for the energy and creativity you bring to work every day that makes GitHub GitHub. I can’t wait to see what we all build in the years to come.”
(Image Credit: GitHub)
