Reminds me of the 100 millionth OpenStreetMap changeset (commit). A few people, myself included, were casually trying for it but in the end it went to someone who wasn't trying and just busy mapping Africa! Much more wholesome, seeing it with hindsight. This person was also previously nominated for an OSM award. I guess it helps that openstreetmap doesn't really allow for creating crap, because it's all live in production, and that's how the Nth commit is way more likely to be someone's random whim? Either way, a fun achievement for Github :)
Awesome! Only a little over a billion more to go before GitHub’s very own OpenAPI Spec can start overflowing int32 on repositories too, just like it already does for workflows run IDs!
I wish I were still at Apple. Probably most people here know that Apple uses an internal tool called "Radar" since, forever. Each "Radar" has an ID (bug #) associated with it.
Radars that were bug #1,000,000, etc. were kind of special. Unless someone screwed up (and let down the whole team) they were usually faux-Radars with lots of inside jokes, etc.
Pulling up one was enough since the Radar could reference other Radars ... and generally you would go down the rabbit hole at that point enjoying the ride.
I was a dumbass not to capture (heck, even print) a few of those when I had the opportunity.
Probably created via a script that just repeatedly checked https://api.github.com/repositories/999999999 until it showed up, and then created a new repository. Since repositories can be modified, could have even given it some buffer and created a bunch of repos, just delete the ones that don't get the right number. [append] Looking at the author's other repo created yesterday, I'm betting "yep" was supposed to be the magic number, and "shit" was an admission of missing the mark.
Does anyone remember D666666 from Facebook? It was a massive codemod; the author used a technique similar to this one to get that particular number.
On a serious note, I'm a bit surprised that GitHub makes it trivial to compute the rate at which new repositories are created. Isn't that kind of information usually a corporate secret?
Makes me wonder how many repositories exist in general, from all the local Forgejo and Gitlab servers. Heck, include Subversion and Mercurial and git's other friends (and foes!)
Did anyone make a search engine for these yet, so we'd be able to get an estimate by searching for the word "a" or so?
(This always seemed like the big upside of centralised GitHub to me: people can actually find your code. I've been thinking of making a search since MS bought GH but didn't think I could do the marketing aspects and so it would be a waste of effort and I never did it. Recently I was considering whether this would be worth revisiting, with the various projects I'm putting on Codeberg, but maybe someone beat me to the punch)
Congratulations on creating the one billionth repository on GitHub
(github.com)591 points by petercooper 11 June 2025 | 135 comments
Comments
In case anyone cares to read more about the OSM milestone, the official blog entry: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2021/02/25/100-million-edits-... My write-up of changeset activity around the event: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/LucGommans/diary/395954
https://github.com/github/rest-api-description/issues/4511
Radars that were bug #1,000,000, etc. were kind of special. Unless someone screwed up (and let down the whole team) they were usually faux-Radars with lots of inside jokes, etc.
Pulling up one was enough since the Radar could reference other Radars ... and generally you would go down the rabbit hole at that point enjoying the ride.
I was a dumbass not to capture (heck, even print) a few of those when I had the opportunity.
https://api.github.com/repositories/1
https://github.com/mojombo/grit
Does anyone remember D666666 from Facebook? It was a massive codemod; the author used a technique similar to this one to get that particular number.
Lame. :-(
Did anyone make a search engine for these yet, so we'd be able to get an estimate by searching for the word "a" or so?
(This always seemed like the big upside of centralised GitHub to me: people can actually find your code. I've been thinking of making a search since MS bought GH but didn't think I could do the marketing aspects and so it would be a waste of effort and I never did it. Recently I was considering whether this would be worth revisiting, with the various projects I'm putting on Codeberg, but maybe someone beat me to the punch)
or incredible commentary on most github repos,
having no purpose, never being realized, and even having given up dreaming.