In my conversations with fellow engineers, git comes up quite a bit. I find myself regularly giving advice both tactical and strategic on its effective use. Learning it in detail is a force multiplier, but few people do. Part of the problem is that training materials are all over the map.

Which is why I was so pleased to discover Git from the inside out. Without question the best introduction to git I’ve come across. It perfectly balances teaching basic commands while also explaining what’s actually happening. Despite having used git at a fairly advanced level for 10 years, I still learned some new things, for example that each git add creates an immutable blob object that is retained for a while even if you git add the same file again, and even if you never commit it. Also that it’s pretty easy to decode raw git objects should you ever need to; here’s a script I wrote to do just that, if you’re curious.

I’ve said before that abstractions are valuable, but they’re not excuses to avoid learning internals, because critical information lies beneath the surface. At the risk of pretentiously quoting myself:

When things go wrong, the engineer must descend into the particulars, and an inability to minimally reason about, if not fully grasp, what lies beneath an abstraction can prove fatal to the debugging process.

I didn’t write the above with version control in mind, but I surely could have. Engineering organizations are full of developers who run stuck the moment a git command fails. You don’t have to be that developer!