In the early days of GitHub—before I was hired—the company founders sought to design a fun error page for the site, as was the style at the time. Git, the version control software upon which the service relies, has a concept known as an “octopus merge”, in which three or more branches of development are combined.
The founders purchased a stock illustration of a half-cat, half-octopus character standing in a puddle and placed it on the pages that appear when a server has a problem or a user requests a link that doesn’t. The character they purchased, then known as the “Octopuss”, was created by Simon Oxley.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-story-behind-GitHub-s-octocat-mascot
Origin story
In the early days of GitHub—before I was hired—the company founders sought to design a fun error page for the site, as was the style at the time. Git, the version control software upon which the service relies, has a concept known as an “octopus merge”, in which three or more branches of development are combined.
The founders purchased a stock illustration of a half-cat, half-octopus character standing in a puddle and placed it on the pages that appear when a server has a problem or a user requests a link that doesn’t. The character they purchased, then known as the “Octopuss”, was created by Simon Oxley. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-story-behind-GitHub-s-octocat-mascot