So You Think You Know Git - FOSDEM 2024
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters point to it as a well-regarded tour of newer, lesser-known Git features, and it is among the most-watched engineering talks of 2024.
What it is
Scott Chacon's FOSDEM 2024 talk on lesser-known Git tips and tricks: useful config settings, older and newer commands, monorepo and big-repo features, and recent GitHub additions. It closes with why he is now building GitButler, followed by a Q&A.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2024 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends craftkiller · 2025-09 · on “Show HN: Downloading a folder from a repo using rust”
You could do a blobless or treeless clone [LINK] Combined with --depth=1 and the --no-checkout / --sparse-checkout flow that the GP already described. I just tested on the emacs repo, left column is disk usage of just the `.git` folder inside: Shallow clones (depth=1): 124K: Treeless clone depth=1 with no-checkout 308K: Blobless clone depth=1 with no-checkout 12M: Treeless clone depth=1 sparse checkout of "doc" folder 12M: Blobless clone depth=1 sparse checkout of "doc" folder 53M: Treeless clone depth=1 non-sparse full checkout 53M: Blobless clone depth=1 non-sparse full checkout 53M: Regular clone with depth=1 Non-shallow clones: 54M: Treeless clone with no-checkout 124M: Blobless clone wi
Cites diarrhea · 2024-02 · on “Git tips and tricks”
I remember watching your FOSDEM talk on YouTube, where you asked whether people have rerere turned on _and_ know what it is, in one question. I have it on, but only the faintest of clues what it is! Just git things, I suppose. [this video]
Cites azangru · 2024-07 · on “Deno 1.45: Workspace and Monorepo Support”
> I'd say that perhaps Git is unsuitable above certain thresholds on numbers of files Scott Chacon in a recent talk about git[0] said that Microsoft uses git to version control Windows. They have ~3.5 million files in the repo, which is about 300 gigabytes in size. There are some tweaks to improve git performance in those scenarios; but still, I'd say it's a pretty impressive threshold. [0] - [this video]
Cites pistoriusp · 2025-02 · on “Most-Watched Software Engineering Talks of 2024”
I know these are conferences that they track, but I happen to know the Scott's talk from FOSDEM titled "So You Think You Know Git?" is at 1.3m million views: [this video]