Git Merge 2015

So today was the GitMerge 2015. Every two-years, git-involved people gathers to share experiences, ideas and drinks. This year, it was hosted in Paris, at La Gaité Lyrique, a beautiful theater. Sponsored by my company, I have been to every talks and here's a summary of what I have seen.

Certainly, the nice touch was that Scott Chacon from Github was doing the Master of Ceremony. The schedule was dense and interesting and can be found here.

Of course, no talks can please everybody so I'll focus of the ones that are related to my current job, or interests.

• Teaching people git* was a really interesting talk. Emma Jane Hogbin Westby showed us a lot of interesting slides as well as tricked us in order to enable us to trick others so that they could make git their own. A little bit meta but no product can be great if nobody uses it. Thus teaching non-technical people a bit a git is the best way to ensure a constant progress in the quality of git.

• Great artists steal*, by Edward Thomson from Microsoft, was also very instructive. It wast a talk with the new Microsoft, not ashamed to use others products, not ashamed to tell when they failed, like anybody doing software development will fail at least once. It could have been a #Failconf talk. Nevertheless, the insight we got of the process of how git landed into visual studio online (aka Team Foundation Server) is pretty inspiring. And we learned that (some) lawyers in Redmond knows how to code.

• Git @ (Google|SAP|Twitter|Microsoft) were pleasant in their own way, depending of the level of git-fu you have achieved in your company.

• Building a Git Extension with First Principles was an annoucement of Git-LFS from Github. Interesting look inside git's internal.

• And the last talk was how Amazon handles deployments à la git. More on the sysadmin side but another example of how versatile git is.

So ? So you count me in for Git Merge 2016, wherever it will be :)