Last summer, Microsoft announced a $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub, which was finalized in December. As promised, GitHub continues to operate independently, but has drafted in some Microsoft expertise for help.
The code-hosting platform has announced it has hired Shanku Niyogi to head up its product development team. Niyogi is a big get for GitHub as he comes from Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP), where he was director of product management.
Despite his more recent ties to Google, Shanku Niyogi is best know for his near two-decade relationship with Microsoft. Indeed, he has only been with Google Cloud since December 2017.
At Microsoft, Niyogi was an engineering general manager for the Visual Studio team. Like GitHub, Visual Studio is a developer-focused service, so Niyogi’s expertise will be well placed. In 2015, Microsoft released Visual Studio Code with participation from Shanku Niyogi.
Visual Studio Code is a code editor that has been open source on GitHub since later 2015.
“At GitHub, we want to be ‘the home for all developers’,” Niyogi said. “Over the years, I’ve had a chance to work on a number of developer products — including Visual Studio Code, TypeScript, .NET, Kubernetes, Go, and Chef. None of these would have had the impact they did without passionate developer teams, strong open source communities, and the homes they had on GitHub.”
Enhancing Enterprise
Despite being allowed to operate independently from Microsoft, GitHub is increasingly important to the company.
“Businesses of every size are becoming software organizations and finding that they have to innovate faster than ever,” Niyogi added. “Doing so doesn’t just require the right tools — companies today also need the right talent. With GitHub, every enterprise has the potential to connect with a community of more than 31 million developers, their code, and their software practices, securely and effectively.”
