Chris Wanstrath is a philanthropist and the founder of Null Games, a developer-friendly publisher of indie games for PC, Mac, and console.
Prior to Null, Chris Wanstrath was the cofounder, CEO, and lead developer of GitHub from 2007 until 2012. He then served as head of product for GitHub.com until returning to the CEO role in 2013. In 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub and Chris left the company on good terms.
Chris's focus on developers and developer experience helped grow GitHub from a weekend side project into the world's largest code community. When he left in 2018, GitHub was a profitable business with over $300M in annual revenue and almost 30 million users. Since then, Microsoft has grown the GitHub community to more than 100 million users and over a billion dollars in annual revenue. Their focus on developers remains unchanged. A lifelong programmer and open-source advocate, Chris is the inventor of the Electron development platform, the Atom text editor, and dozens of open-source projects such as the Mustache templating language, pjax JavaScript library, and Ruby's Resque job queue.
Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Chris taught himself programming at a young age to make video games. Inspired by games like Meridian 59 and Diablo, Chris spent his teens creating games, applications, and websites. He moved to San Francisco in 2005 to work at GameSpot as a web developer.
Always interested in developer tooling and experience, Chris left CNET, Game Spot's parent company, in 2007 to do consulting work and search for his next project. It was during this time that git was spreading from the Linux kernel community to the broader programming community. After experiencing the power of git's workflow and speed, he never went back to the old ways of working. Chris lives in California with his wife, children, and cats. When he's not playing games or writing code, he enjoys playing guitar and reading sci-fi.
