I’ve been using git for a loooong time. My Github account is probably almost half as old as I am, and before this lesson, I considered myself intimately familiar with many of the details of how git works. After all, how many people have had to prune commits out of a git history? Knowing the state of modern software engineering, probably many, but my ego persists nevertheless and I did truly think I understood git quite well.

This lesson, however, exposed the gap in my understanding pretty well. While I might know how to use git, how it works is another question. In particular, I’d never understood what the git hash meant. The fact that files are hashed by content and therefore have the same hashes with different content, was, for example, completely new to me.

Overall, this lesson definitely tightened up quite a bit of my git knowledge, and will definitely help in debugging annoying git issues going forward.

Project Evaluations

I wasn’t there for project evaluations in-person this week, as I wasn’t feeling very well. But I did the project evaluations on my own afterward, reviewred others’ contributions, had some interesting thoughts on their insights.

One interesting thing I noticed was the correlation between large organisations and very clear contribution paths. React, for example, has a huge contribution pipeline with tons of templates and resources, but commits take forever to get approved. Leaner teams have less infrastructure but accept commits faster - provided, of course - that the maintainer is open to those contributions. One thing I found funny was in the description of Kitty’s contributions culture: the student who wrote that one described it as “friendly.” However, I’ve tried contributing to Kitty in the past (in particular merging some image support compositor stuff from a branch into mainline) and the creator, Kovid Goyal, was anything but friendly. I think my takeaway from that though was less that small teams are unfriendly but that small teams are much more dependent on the temperaments of a few key individuals.