Junio Hamano (Japanese: 濱野 純) is a software engineer and hacker from Japan. He is best known for leading a large team of software developers who maintain Git. Linus Torvalds, the original developer, has said that one of his big successes was recognizing Hamano's skills as a developer. Torvalds turned the entire project over to Hamano in July 2005. Hamano lives in California. He works for Google.