Preface

As all good software engineers will agree: version control is important. I was first introduced to version control while studying computer science at university and dabbling with open source in my free time. CVS and Subversion started being used for managing our small pieces of coursework, group projects, and larger open source projects we interacted with. Initially it all felt a bit like overkill: why do I need this when I’m working by myself? It only took a few personal screw-ups for me to understand why version control is so important.

I was introduced to Git in 2006 while working on audio drivers for the Linux kernel at a summer internship. It was a fairly terrifying beast in those days: incredibly fast compared to its competitors, impressive in how it managed almost everything offline, but with an arcane user interface that was full of jargon. The jargon has decreased, but everything else remains fairly similar: Git is fast, impressive, and confusing.