Strange Loop

2009 - 2023

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St. Louis, MO

Re-Writing History

We're going to re-write 'git'. Not by knowing how git works and re-implementing it; we're going to discover git. We'll pretend to be Linus Torvalds sitting down in 2005 to write a version control system, and we'll pretend to be Graydon Hoare, a member of the Monotone team that originated many of these ideas. What will make this 'git' specifically is the solutions we take to problems that come up along the way, and we'll discuss each fork in the road as we get to it. What we're going to write will be byte-compatible with git, so that we can run git log and our version controlled files will show up. We'll end with something that, measured by features, looks like git's own third commit, and finish by comparing git's C code to the few hundred lines of Ruby we've written.

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Lito Nicolai

Lito Nicolai

Re-Writing History Casts, LLC

Lito is a programming educator from Seattle, Washington. He wants to trace programming ideas through time to understand where they come from, and to teach himself and others to understand the perspective of the original developers of historically interesting programs. He thinks about how to make computer science ideas more accessible to newer programmers.