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Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
The first thing you see upon arrival at GitHub's brand new San Francisco headquarters is Ryan Tomayko's Macbook Pro. This beat-up old laptop is where Tomayko, one of the company's first engineers, created the "pull request" -- the all-important way of contributing software code (and all sorts of other stuff) to projects housed on the company's web service, a contraption that has redefined the way the world builds things.
The Macbook is considered an historic artifact, and it's preserved as a museum piece. You can still see the black duct tape that Tomayko stuck on the left side of the machine to keep it from shocking him, covering a spot where his hands had worn down the machine's metal casing.
This hallowed machine is just the beginning of the carefully constructed, strangely beautiful, and wonderfully eclectic creation that is the new GitHub office. You'll find everything from a Steam Punk teepee to a faux railroad track to a recreation of the Oval Office. Like its old HQ, the place mirrors the company's mission. GitHub gives people the power to build software -- and so much more --- in a way that seamlessly melds so many different ideas, tastes, and opinions, and the office was pieced together in the same way. In fact, much of it was designed on the GitHub web service.
To the right of the mini-museum that houses Tomayko's laptop is the Oval Office, GitHub's reception room, which is a pretty darned good replica of Obama's digs at the White House. Behind GitHub's copy of the Resolute Desk sits Haley Yoder. She is GitHub's brand new concierge, but people call her the president. It's a metaphor for a company that scoffs at hierarchy, appreciates a good joke, and has picked up $100 million in venture capital money.
While the company's concierge sits at a presidential desk, co-founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner occupies an unremarkable workspace three floors up. And in between, there's an assortment of hacking spaces, design rooms, and well-thought-out facilities that can only be described as the ultimate coder's playland.
There's a three-person animation studio and a television production crew called "the Eagles." People can work wherever they want -- in Zen-like meditation rooms or dark coder caves on the second floor, or on wooden benches one floor up in the Indoor Park, a sunny spot of faux-greenery that somehow resembles an indoor lawn-bowling green with picnic tables.
Built in a 108-year-old former dried fruit storage facility (Rosenberg Bros. & Co.), this is 55,000 square-foot space was first mapped out by a team led by chief information officer Scott Chacon, but soon they uploaded the plans to the company's internal GitHub repository and invited employees to post their comments -- and essentially hack the new building's designs. Last year, a GitHubber named Russell Belfer suggested "a wall of work nooks" where people could "tuck in and hack." That idea eventually became a wall of dark coder caves on the second floor.
San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and friends of the company are dropping by today, for the new building's official ribbon cutting ceremony, but you can take your own tour here.
All photos: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED 
