Two decades of Git: A conversation with creator Linus Torvalds
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it for Linus's direct opinions on Git and development tooling, such as calling the SHA-256 migration pointless churn.
What it is
GitHub interviews Linus Torvalds on twenty years of Git, from its creation in about ten days as a Linux kernel tool to its role in modern software development. He discusses technical decisions, community contributions and the project's philosophy.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends ontouchstart · 2026-02 · on “The Missing Semester of Your CS Education”
I watched this YouTube video Two decades of Git: A conversation with creator Linus Torvalds [this video] I was surprised that he only spent four months on it as a maintainer. What a great piece of work by a great software developer.
Cites sam_lowry_ · 2025-11 · on “Git 3.0 will use main as the default branch”
> changing from SHA-1 to SHA-256 for greater security Linus has a different view, he referred to the SHA-256 migration as "pointless churn": [this video] SHA-1 is not broken enough to be a serious issue for git. The migration to SHA-256 has been forced by on git by clueless morons, and it is, in this very special way, similar to the master-main rename.
Cites conartist6 · 2026-01 · on “I program without syntax highlighting”
Aha, found it. No you're right it is his own hacked up emacs fork, but he does also say that it lacks color. Found it in the video here: [this video]