15 Years of Git - A New Stack Podcast
Linus Torvalds invented Git 15 years ago in order to continue development of the Linux kernel. Following on this 15 year milestone, the Newstack recorded a discussion with industry leaders from GitHub, GitLab and Weaveworks - companies who have all built businesses around Git.
Linus Torvalds invented Git 15 years ago in order to continue development of the Linux kernel. The original team could no longer use BitKeeper. At the time, no other Source Control Management (SCMs) met their specific requirements for a distributed system.
Torvalds, the creator of Linux, took on the challenge and emerged the following week with Git. Today Git is used for thousands of projects. It has also taken pair programming in a new direction by introducing social coding among programmers.
Following on this 15 year milestone, the Newstack recorded a podcast with industry leaders from GitHub, GitLab and Weaveworks - all companies who have built their businesses around Git:
- Jason Warner, CTO, GitHub.
- Cornelia Davis, CTO, Weaveworks.
- Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO, GitLab.
Alex Williams of the New Stack hosted the podcast and discussed the present state of Git and what its future holds. One of the things drilled down on that relates directly to the companies who were interviewed is where along the trajectory of abstraction are we with Git? "This is always what I remembered about GitHub when I started writing about them," says Alex, "it was basically an application that successfully abstracted Git." As we all know, Git is not the simplest and most forgiving tool to use. Most of us rely on those 5 or 6 commands to get your work done. Few of us are ever Git masters.
“Git of course is amazingly powerful, but the magic of what GitHub did, particularly at the time is that it took the commands you knew to run Git and extended those creating a better developer experience for Git,” says Jason Warner. Adding a UI on top of Git was a game changer for distributed software development and also changed the way we produce software in general. It’s made Git approachable and it brings the power of a distributed version control system and has fundamentally changed the way we organize teams and create code today.
"Git was definitely the entry point for tools such as GitLab and GitHub. Of course Git would never have existed without Linux, which is one of the most important inventions as far as software goes in the last 25 years," says Jason. But essentially it was Git and its distributed architecture is what precipitated a new way of doing software development.
Weaveworks uses Git in an interesting way as well, says Cornelia. “We believe that Git has a certain set of primitives that allows you to operationalize the process of delivery.”
Listen to the rest of the podcast here:
