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tekacsyesterday at 7:44 PM13 repliesview on HN

Maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but... 3,800 repos? I guess I find it kind of surprising they have that many!


Replies

PAndreewyesterday at 8:18 PM

As others have said it's just a fraction. I'm in a medium size tech-related company and we have 7500+ in one Github org. We have two orgs, so altogether easily 10K+. Of course most of it is stale, obsolete, sandbox, personal tools, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if Github would have 100K+ internal repos or even more.

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ashishbyesterday at 8:39 PM

Uber had 8000 repos at one point with 2000 engineers - https://highscalability.com/lessons-learned-from-scaling-ube...

philipp-gayretyesterday at 8:35 PM

I worked for a food retail store once. I remember going in the first day wondering, how hard can it really be... From the outside, it looks like they have a simple website. The website to order things on was an amalgamation of 300+ repo's. GitHub lost less in this breach. It takes a lot of effort to keep things simple as you grow.

ryanhechtyesterday at 10:21 PM

Something cool that I've always liked about working at GitHub is how much of the company _runs on GitHub_ -- A lot of teams, even non-technical teams, have their own repos just to organize docs/SOP's/designs/etc like a traditional knowledge work company might use a Sharepoint

tempayyesterday at 8:01 PM

Personally I have over a hundred, especially from quick prototypes, studies or instances of templates so I can easily see how over 18 years and many hundreds of employees you end up with thousands.

MrDarcyyesterday at 7:57 PM

3800 is low for an org like GitHub. Glad it’s highly likely not all their repos are compromised.

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dgellowyesterday at 8:01 PM

I was part of an org with more than 15k repos

newsofthedayyesterday at 8:00 PM

It sounds low to me, I worked at a Fortune high number a few years ago and they had more.

skissaneyesterday at 8:50 PM

In my personal experience, give it a decade or two, and any corporation will accumulate hundreds (or even thousands) of abandoned internal repos containing discontinued services, POCs/prototypes that never went anywhere, etc – people forget to archive them, or aren't sure whether something is still in use or not so err on the safe side.

AI is making this even worse. With coding agents, anyone can throw together a quick internal prototype of any idea they have, even if it has no hope of ever making it to production.

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noelsusmanyesterday at 8:08 PM

Am I missing the joke here... they have hundreds of millions of repos.

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eddythompson80yesterday at 8:00 PM

really? I mean these are internal repos. Probably most of them are random one-off experiments or a place to park code. Google has 2,900 "public" repos on github. Microsoft has ~8k "public" on github too. Can't even imagine how many they have on their internal systems.

paulddraperyesterday at 8:27 PM

They have 800 engineers. So 3,800 repos is high, but not crazy.

Some of those could be forks.