David Poll

I’m David Poll. I lead the Code & Review organization at GitHub, and I’ve spent nearly two decades building the platforms and tools developers use every day.

The question I keep coming back to is how we build things that make other builders more powerful.

Where that question has taken me

  • MicrosoftSilverlight, where I learned framework design and API craftsmanship.
  • ParseEmployee #4. We built backend-as-a-service for millions of mobile developers, and I stayed through the Facebook acquisition.
  • HoomiFounder and CEO of an identity and authentication startup that didn't work out and taught me the hard way.
  • GoogleFirebase, Google Assistant, Google Play Services, and Google Cloud. Each one taught me something different about how platforms grow and change.
  • GitHubLeading Code & Review, where we are reworking code review and the pull request for agentic coding.

Along the way I learned that good developer experience takes solid engineering and real empathy for the people using your tools. The best platforms get used for things nobody planned.

What I write about

Mostly platform thinking, developer experience, trust, and how engineering organizations work. Lately I keep coming back to how AI changes who gets to be a developer, and which problems become solvable. If you’re new here, start with these.

  1. The Only Way to Build Trust Is to Give Trust Most managers wait for trust to be earned. After a decade of managing engineers, I think that's backwards. 9 min
  2. The 4p Developer: The Missing Layer in Platform Thinking Developers who build tools for other developers on your platform are worth billions, and most platforms accidentally kill them. 8 min
  3. Orderly API Evolution: How to Break APIs Without Breaking Trust Breaking changes are inevitable. What you're protecting is trust, and MCP shows how fuzzy 'breaking' gets once an agent sits between you and your users. 12 min
  4. Code Review Is Not About Catching Bugs If review's job is catching bugs, AI makes it a bottleneck. Its real job, deciding whether a change belongs, just got more important. 12 min

Beyond the terminal

I have three kids, and raising them with my wife is beautiful chaos. I sing barbershop harmony, which is basically distributed systems for humans. I grew up in a family of therapists, which turned out to be management training. I hold B.A. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where I was a Siebel Scholar.

You can reach me at [email protected], or find me on LinkedIn, X, and GitHub.