

Linus Torvalds' Greatest Invention

Happy Guy Fawkes' Day! On Wednesday night I gave a talk for the Philadelphia Linux Users' Group on "Linus Torvalds' Greatest Invention". I was hoping that some people would show up expecting it to be Linux, but someone spilled the beans ahead of time and everyone knew it was going to be about Git. But maybe that wasn't so bad because a bunch of people showed up to hear about Git. But then they were probably disappointed because I didn't talk at all about how to use Git. I talked a little about what it would do, and some about implementation. I used to give a lot of talks of the type "a bunch of interesting crap I threw together about X", but in recent years I've felt that a talk needs to have a theme. So for quite a while I knew I wanted to talk about Git internals, but I didn't know what the theme was. Then I realized that the theme could be that Git proves that Linus was really clever. With Linux, the OS was already designed for him, and he didn't have to make a lot of the important decisions, like what it means to be a file. But Git is full of really clever ideas that other people might not have thought of. Anyway, the slides are online if you are interested in looking.

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