Software at Scale 35 - Maintaining Git with Johannes Schindelin

Johannes Schindelin is the maintainer (BDFL) of Git for Windows.

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Git is a fundamental piece of the software community, and we get to learn the history and inner workings of the project in this episode. Maintaining a widely-used open source project involves a ton of expected complexity around handling bug reports, deprecations, and inclusive culture, but also requires management of inter-personal relationships, ease of contribution, and other aspects that are fascinating to learn about.

Highlights

00:06 - How did Johannes end up as the maintainer of Git for Windows?

06:30 - The Git community in the early days. Fun fact: Git used to be called `dircache`

08:30 - How many downloads does Git for Windows get today?

10:15 - Why does Git for Windows a separate project? Why not make improvements to Git itself?

24:00 - How do you deprecate functionality when there are millions of users of your product and you have no telemetry?

30:00 - What does being the BDFL of a project mean? What does Johannes day-to-day look like?

33:00 - What is GitGitGadget? How does it make contributions easier?

41:00 - How do foster an inclusive community of an open-source project?

50:00 - What’s next for Git?

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