GitHub’s geektastic 14,000-square-foot loft mirrors its mission: to democratize computer programming. GitHub.com is best thought of as Facebook for geeks. Instead of uploading videos of your cat, you upload software. Anyone can comment on your code and add to it and build it into something better. The trick is that it decentralizes programming, giving everyone a new kind of control. GitHub has shaken up the way software gets written, making coding a little more anarchic, a little more fun, and a lot more productive.

And the software world loves it. GitHub now has more than 1.3 million users, and over 2 million source code repositories — eight times the tally from just two years ago. ... Two years ago, GitHub was a team of eight, holding company meetings in San Francisco cafes. ... In July, they took over the former digs of blogging outfit Six Apart. GitHub is growing fast — and it hasn’t taken a dime of venture funding.