How we architect and optimize GitHub

The world's largest developer platform

Docs

Everything you need to master GitHub, all in one place.

Go to Docs

GitHub

Build what's next on GitHub, the place for anyone from anywhere to build anything.

Start building

Customer stories

Meet the companies and engineering teams that build with GitHub.

Learn more

GitHub Universe 2026

Join us October 28-29 in San Francisco or online for GitHub Universe, our flagship developer event uniting people, agents, and the world's code.

Latest

Improving Git push times through faster server side hooks
The history of pre-receive hooks, how we discovered that the performance was problematic, and how we went about safely replacing them.Carlos Martín Nieto, Thomas GummererApril 21, 2022
Learn more
Performance at GitHub: deferring stats with rack.after_reply
How we sped up GitHub.com by moving slow, non-critical code into rack.after_reply.blakewilliamsApril 11, 2022
Learn more
A brief history of code search at GitHub
This blog post tells the story of why we built a new search engine optimized for code.Pavel AvgustinovDecember 15, 2021
Learn more
Improving GitHub code search
Today, we are rolling out a technology preview for GitHub code search, the next iteration for search, discovery, and navigation on GitHub.Pavel AvgustinovDecember 8, 2021
Learn more
How we use Web Components at GitHub
At GitHub, we pride ourselves on delivering a first-class developer experience. A considerable part of our work is on our front end, which we strive to keep as lightweight, fast,…May 4, 2021
Learn more
How GitHub Actions renders large-scale logs
Rendering logs in a web UI might seem simple: they are just lines of plain text. However, there are a lot of additional features that make them more useful to…March 25, 2021
Learn more
GitHub Mobile and GraphQL
GitHub’s mobile applications have used GraphQL to power new features. We’ve now been able to move faster and get more done with less hassle and no over-fetching. We were able…September 23, 2020
Learn more
Why Write ADRs
How architecture decision records can help your team.August 13, 2020
Learn more
CodeGen: Semantic’s improved language support system
The Semantic Code team shipped a massive improvement to the language support system that powers code navigation. Code navigation features only scratch the surface of possibilities that start to open up when we combine Semantic‘s program analysis potential with GitHub’s scale.August 4, 2020
Learn more
From 48k lines of code to 10—the story of GitHub’s JavaScript SDK
Learn about the legacy, architecture, and methods used to reduce 48k lines of code to 10 as we take a deep dive into GitHub’s Javascript SDK.April 9, 2020
Learn more
How Four Native Developers Wrote An Electron App
Today we released the new GitHub Desktop Beta, rewritten on Electron.Electron is a well-known on-ramp for web developers to build desktop apps using familiar web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.May 16, 2017
Learn more
How we made diff pages three times faster
We serve a lot of diffs here at GitHub. Because it is computationally expensive to generate and display a diff, we’ve traditionally had to apply some very conservative limits on…December 6, 2016
Learn more
Introducing DGit
Edit: DGit is now called Spokes GitHub hosts over 35 million repositories and over 30 million Gists on hundreds of servers. Over the past year, we’ve built DGit, a new…April 5, 2016
Learn more
Delivering Octicons with SVG
GitHub.com no longer delivers its icons via icon font. Instead, we’ve replaced all the Octicons throughout our codebase with SVG alternatives. While the changes are mostly under-the-hood, you’ll immediately feel…February 22, 2016
Learn more

The world's largest developer platform

The world's largest developer platform

Architecture & optimization

Latest