How We Built The Github Globe

Leo Migdal

-Nov 1, 2025, 2:11 PM

This post is the fifth installment of our five-part series on building GitHub’s new homepage: How our globe is built How we collect and use the data behind the globe… In the fourth installment of our five-part series on building GitHub’s new homepage, we’ll explore the artistic pipeline at GitHub to explain story, character and color, and to show how… GitHub is introducing post-quantum secure key exchange methods for SSH access to better protect Git data in transit. Our best practices for quickly identifying, resolving, and preventing issues at scale. Plus, considerations in updating one of GitHub’s oldest and most heavily used features. The GitHub homepage features a very nice rotating 3D globe, augmented with realtime data shooting around.

Here’s how they built it: At the most fundamental level, the globe runs in a WebGL context powered by three.js. We feed it data of recent pull requests that have been created and merged around the world through a JSON file. The scene is made up of five layers: a halo, a globe, the Earth’s regions, blue spikes for open pull requests, and pink arcs for merged pull requests. We don’t use any textures: we point four lights at a sphere, use about 12,000 five-sided circles to render the Earth’s regions, and draw a halo with a simple custom shader on the backside... Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google.

From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …) View more... GitHub is where the world builds software. More than 56 million developers around the world build and work together on GitHub. With a new homepage, they wanted to show how open-source development transcends the borders they're living in and tell our product story through the lens of a developer’s journey. Creating a GitHub Globe using three.js is a great way to visualize and explore the repositories on GitHub in a 3D environment. In this project, we'll walk you through the process of building a GitHub Globe from scratch.

GeoJSON is a format for encoding a variety of geographic data structures. It is based on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), a lightweight data interchange format, and is used to represent spatial features such as points, lines, and polygons, as well as their properties. GeoJSON is a widely used format for storing and exchanging spatial data, and is supported by many software libraries, web APIs, and geospatial databases. It is especially popular in the context of web mapping and web services, where it is used to transfer data between the server and client. GeoJSON data consists of a collection of features, each of which has a geometry (such as a point, line, or polygon) and a set of properties. The geometry is defined using longitude and latitude coordinates, and can be represented in various projections.

The properties are a set of key-value pairs that describe the feature, and can include any information that is relevant to the feature. Penpot's new component system for building scalable design systems, emphasizing designer-developer collaboration. Key CSS developments from CSSWG meeting, including inline conditionals, cross-document transitions, and anchor positioning. Journalist Samantha Cole explores the reality behind viral 'internet vape' memes, testing a smart vape with limited connectivity features. Steve Jobs' visionary 1983 Aspen talk highlights the crucial role of design in making personal computers accessible and envisions them as tools for creativity and human progress. Learn how to design effective conversational AI experiences with this comprehensive guide by Yinjian Huang.

They even had a post about it, too: https://stripe.com/blog/globe Still, given that the "form" is well established, it is always interesting to me at least to see how they chose to represent the data. When Blekko was running Bryn Dole had done a visualization based on this theme were query requests were highlighted as streams from their point of origin (more queries, taller stream as I recall). FWIW I'm currently running a Twitter poll to see whose globe people like better. 8 hours in the votes are running 60% Github, 40% Stripe: https://twitter.com/calcsam/status/1344396912896712706

I'm also not forgetting Microsoft's checkered history with open source, or their current deals with government agencies like ICE and the DoD. Have you had a chance to check out the new 3D globe on our homepage? Head over to our blog to learn how the team built it using WebGL and three.js. https://github.co/34znJPB Would love to hear more about how the instanced mesh was used to render all the geometry and how you created the halo material for the glowy effect. Great read!

👩💻Java Developer | 🌱Spring Boot| 🛠️Backend | 💡Problem Solver | 🧙♀️Solution Magess Java/Groovy Developer @Finture Node.js, React.js, Next.js, Front-end developer This is great GitHub kudos to the team who built it. In the fourth installment of our five-part series on building GitHub’s new homepage, we’ll explore the artistic pipeline at GitHub to explain story, character and color, and to show how… This post is the third installment of our five-part series on building GitHub’s new homepage: How our globe is built How we collect and use the data behind the globe… In October, we experienced four incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.

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How We Built The Github Globe

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