There’s Something to be Said for Talent
Linus Torvalds is in the news again this morning, and I'm glad to see he's now aware of the effect he had on people, it got me thinking about git and I thought I remembered that he wrote the first version of git after something happened with the license on the SCM tool he was using on the Linux Kernel. So I hit Wikipedia, and sure enough, there was a license issue with BitKeeper, and so Linus wrote the first version of git.
What I hadn't remembered was the timeline - and that's what amazed me this morning:
- 3 April 2005 - Development Starts on git
- 6 April 2005 - the git project is announced
- 7 April 2005 - git is self-hosting
- 18 April 2005 - first merge of multiple branches
- 29 April 2005 - performance target is achieved: 6.7 patches per second
- 16 June 2005 - linux kernel 2.6.12 release is managed by git
So a couple of months to get a SCM that hosts one of the most influential codebases that currently exists... that's more than impressive... that's down right amazing.
Think about all that git has effected... GitHub, BitBucket, GitLabs - there's an industry built up around it - that's wild to think about. Sure, the guy may not be someone you want to have over for dinner, but what he accomplished in a few months was nothing short of amazing. And all of us in the tech community have benefited from it.
There is something to be said for talent... it's not necessarily sitting in the prettiest of packages, but we would all do well to look past the packaging, and try to see the real value under the covers. It can be revolutionary.