GitHub Universe 2025 was Awesome! - Here's What I Learned

The tech world feels massive, but the ecosystem is tiny. Day 1 was a reminder of that—running into friends, peers, and former coworkers from all over the world gave me a much needed energy boost going into the week. In person can sometimes be better. Not always.

GitHub has built a partner ecosystem, but like any small town, closeness demands accountability. Rumors about “bad partners” usually trace back to people acting without awareness of the ecosystem they depend on. Partner models only work with intentional give-and-take and aligned incentives. Watching GitHub scale its partner model as adoption grows has been impressive. They don’t always hit the nail on the head with partner content, but they are consistently looking for input and feedback on what to do better. Nothing is worse than a tone deaf vendor that just wants its partners to only do their bidding, or a partner that just wants vendor leads and is not interested in actually partnering in success. After years at Red Hat during its rocket-ship phase, I learned that you can’t do it alone.

In an industry where it seems people hop companies yearly in search of equity and fame, GitHub retains talent. That consistency shapes a partner experience that actually feels consistent. Institutional knowledge gets preserved, best practices spread, and relationships don’t reset every 12 months. When that many people stay that long, it’s not just the comp plan—something deeper is working. It seems Microsoft acknowledges that. . 

Universe always brings together passionate people doing wildly different things with the same tools. Hearing what someone is building — whether it’s enterprise tech or something completely unrelated — reminds you why you stay in this industry. Passion is contagious. Helping developers pursue their passion is why I build the tools, mostly since I can’t do it myself. 

Corporate America has gotten… heavier. Travel feels worse, hotels feel worse, everything feels like a chore. Yet the whimsical, nostalgic, just-plain-fun atmosphere at Universe cuts through all that. When companies “grow up,” too many forget that creating joy is part of creating culture. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Make people smile. Experiences matter.

Years of underinvesting in internal IT, outsourcing capability, or treating engineering as a cost center is reaching its breaking point. AI has quietly (and still massively under-estimatedly) reset the development process back to square one. Combine that with global security pressure, and companies that ignored their technical foundations may finally face accountability — even in a booming market. The gap between organizations that proactively reinvent their developer experience and those that don’t is about to widen fast.