Tommy Byrd

After a decade working in the closed source world, frustrated with software you could only change by opening a ticket that usually went unanswered, my company started to use GitHub for requesting changes to our public knowledge base and my eyes were opened. I never thought you there could be a workflow where anyone in the world could request a change to your source code and it be so easily accepted. I took computer science classes in high school and college, learned some Pascal, a little C++, and did lots of pretty basic websites with HTML and JavaScript, but it wasn't until I discovered GitHub that I really became a "programmer" in the true sense. On GitHub I could read up on exactly how other people wrote their software, see what made sense to me, and experiment on my own time without every having to worry about messing up somebody else's project. Now I work for GitHub as a Solutions Engineer, helping to teach these same concepts that helped me reignite my passion for technology.