Millions of people rely on GitHub today, from their very first steps on their journey as developers, to contributing their best ideas to the world. Today, I am incredibly excited and honored to join GitHub to lead the Product Team.

At GitHub, we want to be “the home for all developers.” The strength of GitHub is also built on you, our community of users, contributors, and maintainers. GitHub would not be successful without your efforts and contributions. Every new developer today has a home with millions of fellow developers and the code and content they need to get started. Developers from across the world can come together to form teams and solve problems or build the next big thing.

Over the years, I’ve had a chance to work on a number of developer products—including Visual Studio Code, TypeScript, .NET, Kubernetes, Go, and Chef. None of these would have had the impact they did without passionate developer teams, strong open source communities, and the homes they had on GitHub.

GitHub is also a home for enterprise innovation. Businesses of every size are becoming software organizations and finding that they have to innovate faster than ever. Doing so doesn’t just require the right tools—companies today also need the right talent. With GitHub, every enterprise has the potential to connect with a community of more than 31 million developers, their code, and their software practices, securely and effectively.

I joined GitHub because I believe in the promise of its unique mission: to connect people and code across barriers of all shapes and sizes. I believe in the power of people joining together, forming a team, and solving a problem. I believe in the opportunity GitHub has as a catalyst for collaboration. And I believe that GitHub will continue to build that special home for every developer.

So what lies ahead? Much is already underway. Inspired by our users, we are taking steps to make every experience on GitHub better. We’re working with maintainers to help them build and manage thriving communities. We’re helping individuals and teams get started with features like free private repositories. We’re making developer workflows easier to build and share. And we’re partnering across the industry to make it easier for developers to build and deploy software safely and securely.

In 2018, our community grew by over 8 million users, and over 40 percent in the number of repositories. This growth brings new challenges: making GitHub an inclusive and productive place for every kind of developer; helping the software world work with each other safely and securely; helping open source projects find sustainability and success; and continuing to build on the ease of use, speed, and reliability that earned GitHub its place in the community.

The journey is just beginning, and the future is bright. We look forward to working with you to build this home together.