9 HN recommenders · recommended in 17 months, 2007–2023
1:10:15 · 4.1M views · May 14, 2007
Linus Torvalds gives a Google tech talk on git, the source control system he created two years earlier. He argues for distributed version control over centralized systems such as CVS and Subversion.
HN repeatedly recommends it as the iconic explanation of why git is designed as it is and why distributed VCS beats centralized ones.
20 comments from Hacker News
you are getting confused here. what you have is a "paper receipt" (your checked out version) from your bank. something that, if you need an up-to-date version (from another remote), you need to request a new one (by issuing git fetch). git is, by default, distributed, so whenever you need to see the world outside, you need to be explicit. linus made it this way because back in the day (not sure right now tbf) tons of kernel developers do work without any internet connection, and would only connect to pull/send patches. this talk[0] by linus from 2007 (i remember watching it on google videos lol) explains really well where the git mentality came from. i really recommend it to you, since it feels like you are not really getting how git works. [0] this video
John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless. His QuakeCon talks are particularly good. QuakeCon 2011 - [LINK] QuakeCon 2012 - [LINK] I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code. Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM. this video
This can not be posted too many times. this video Linus Torvalds talk on Google about how GIT is more a way of working then a piece of software. Everybody commits upwards in a tree of trust. If you do it this way you get automatic code reviews and in any team someone should be responsible for the "product" anyway and highest up in the hierarchy.
This talk by Linus is iconic, if you haven't watched it you should. this video He talks about what SVN got wrong, specifically, that it made branching easy and it's the merging that's the important piece. Git won because it made merging easy.
A great speech @ Google on a subject directly apropos of pg's start-up spiel: [LINK] Another awesome speech from Google's tech talk series (it takes a little bit of tyrant to pull this off, tho): this video