20 years of Git

Summary

Twenty years ago today, Linus Torvalds made the very first commit to Git, the information manager from hell. Over these last 20 years, Git went from a small, simple, personal project to the most massively dominant version control system ever built.I have personally had a hell of a ride on this particular software roller coaster.I started using Git for something you might not imagine it was intended for, only a few months after it’s first commit. I then went on to found GitHub, write arguably the most widely read book on Git, build the official website of the project, start the annual developer conference, etc - this little project has changed the world of software development, but more personally, it has massively changed the course of my life.I thought it would be fun today, as the Git project rolls into it’s third decade, to remember the earliest days of Git and explain a bit why I find this project so endlessly fascinating.VIDEOEnjoy Kiril and I drinking wine and building the very first commit of Git, exploring what it could do from the very beginning.Patches and TarballsBefore we get into the history of Git and my relationship with it, I want to start with why Git exists and the mindset that it was started with.Git started from frustration in the Linux kernel development community over version control and collaboration.The kernel community has always used mailing lists for collaboration. It’s actually a pretty fascinating method of collaboration - it is massively scalable, highly distributed, local first, capable of fine grained discussion of patches, cryptographically securable, etc. The gist of the mailing list collaboration flow is:publish a tarball (sort of zip file) of a known state of the projectpeople download that and expand it locallymodify it with whatever feature or fix they want to changerun GNU diff on it to create a patch that the maintainer can apply to that initial known state to add that featureemail that patch or a series of them to a mailing l...