Two decades of Git: A conversation with creator Linus Torvalds

GitHub · 548.6K views · 2025-04-09 · 41:50

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

HN commenters cite it for Linus's direct opinions on Git and development tooling, such as calling the SHA-256 migration pointless churn.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2025–2026

Topics

Tech pioneers & interviews Testing, debugging & developer tools Linux & open-source ecosystems

What people said

ontouchstart · 2026-02 · Recommendation
I watched this YouTube video Two decades of Git: A conversation with creator Linus Torvalds [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.
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conartist6 · 2026-01 · Reference
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: [VIDEO]
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sam_lowry_ · 2025-11 · Reference
> 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": [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.
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Sources

Video by GitHub, played through YouTube.

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