Tom Preston Werner

Early life

Preston-Werner grew up in Dubuque, Iowa. His father died when he was a child. His mother was a teacher and his stepfather was an engineer.

He graduated grade school at Dubuque Senior High School and attended Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California for 2 years before dropping out to pursue other endeavours. He realized that he enjoyed programming far more than the math that was the core of his physics studies.

Influence

As an active contributor to the open-source developer and hacker culture, most prominently in areas involving the programming language Ruby, he has written enthusiastic articles regarding his philosophies and opinions on various issues. He has been featured as a guest on podcasts, including Rubyology and SitePoint, and he often speaks out about his conviction that developers should seek to collaborate more, and the measures which would promote such collaboration, such as writing better documentation and contributing to other people's projects.

In 2008 Tom Preston-Werner spoke about the application of conceptual algorithms to higher-level thinking patterns, rather than solely to coding patterns.

Preston was one of the initial members of the San Francisco group IcanhazRuby or ICHR, after he had become a regular member of the San Francisco Ruby Meetups, until the meetings had become overwhelmed by venture capital investors searching for talent; this prompted him to seek more private gatherings. On April 8, 2011 he also started a conference called CodeConf, by means of GitHub's influence in the coding community.

Preston-Werner is the creator of the TOML configuration file format.

Career

In an article published by Hacker Monthly in 2010, Preston wrote about his passion for ensuring that developers document the code they write so others can easily understand how it works.

In 2004, Preston-Werner founded Gravatar, a service for providing globally unique avatars that follow users from site to site. The company grew to about 32,000 users in 2007, when Preston-Werner sold the company to Automattic. In 2005 he moved to San Francisco to work at Powerset, a natural language search engine. Eventually Powerset was acquired by Microsoft. Preston-Werner declined a $300,000 bonus and stock options from Microsoft so that he could focus on GitHub.

GitHub

While with Powerset, Preston-Werner met Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett at a Ruby developer meet-up in San Francisco. In 2008, the three founders, with the fourth founder, Scott Chacon, founded web-based GitHub as a place to share and collaborate on code.

Architects, musicians, city governments, builders and others are currently using GitHub to share and collaborate on projects beyond software code.

In 2010, while visiting relatives in Iowa, Tom saw a comment written about GitHub on Twitter in which the poster insulted the quality of the search functionality of GitHub. After seeing all of the comments, Tom considered their accuracy and decided that the original comment was in fact valid; he personally set out to completely overhaul the service's search functionality by drawing on his experience having worked at Powerset.

Resignation from GitHub

In March 2014, GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath alleged that founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner and his wife Theresa engaged in a pattern of harassment against her that led her to leave the company. In April 2014, GitHub released a statement denying Horvath's allegations. However, following an internal investigation, GitHub confirmed the claims. GitHub's new CEO Chris Wanstrath wrote on the company blog, "The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub’s CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office." Preston-Werner then resigned from the company.