EVENT
Google Tech Talk on Git
- Six months after Linus Torvalds gave his famous May 2007 Google Tech Talk on the origins of Git (which focused heavily on what Git is not and roasted legacy version control), I was invited by Google to present a companion talk.
- My presentation, titled "Randal Schwartz on Git", was designed to explain what Git actually is conceptually—focusing on its content-addressable storage database structure, directed acyclic graphs (DAG), and commit object modeling.
- PLUG Dress Rehearsal & Surprise Guest:
- Before presenting the talk at Google, I wanted a dress rehearsal, so I volunteered to speak at the Portland Linux Users Group (PLUG), where I was a frequent speaker.
- I invited Linus Torvalds to attend. Linus initially declined, saying "no, I don't normally do those sorts of things", but eventually agreed to come.
- Sitting quietly in the corner, nobody in the audience of 100 people recognized Linus at first.
- Midway through the talk, an audience member asked me a highly technical question I didn't know the answer to.
- I turned toward the corner and casually asked, "Linus, how does that work?"
- You could have heard a pin drop in that room of 100 people as everyone turned their heads and suddenly realized that Linus Torvalds himself was sitting right there in the room.
- PLUG Dress Rehearsal & Surprise Guest:
- The talk demystified the mental model shift required for Git, making it extremely accessible to developers who were transitioning from Subversion (SVN) and CVS.
- My Google Tech Talk became one of the most popular and recommended video tutorials for learning Git globally for several years, helping catalyze early mainstream adoption of the tool.
- Following its viral success, I went on to deliver this highly acclaimed Git conceptual presentation at major international open-source venues worldwide, most notably at FISL (Fórum Internacional de Software Livre) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and numerous other global developer forums.
What links here
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.