Last week the GitButler team, with the help and support of GitHub, organized this year's Git Merge conference.
I have a special place in my heart for Git Merge, as I helped create it (and possibly name it, though that is up for debate) way back in 2013. This year it looked as though it might not happen again, which prompted the GitButler team to see if we could help make sure the event takes place.
The conference was broken up into three parts - the talks day, an un-conference day and a contributor's summit. What transpired was an un-matched version control nerd-fest.
Talks Day
On day one we had 12 speakers who were selected via an RFP process by GitHub's Taylor Blau and myself. Each spoke for 20 minutes, which made for a fast, fun set of Git related talks.
All of the talks were recorded and will be put up on our YouTube channel shortly. (Smash that subscribe button)
Unconf Day
The second day was run as an un-conference. Everyone wrote up and voted on potential 45 minute breakout talks, the crowd self-organized which talks would be in which rooms at what time, and that was the schedule of the day.
These talks ranged from new ideas for the Git user interface inspired by Meta's Sapling project, ideas for resumable pushes, new large file support concepts, and more. GitButler and the Jujutsu team led a discussion around "fearless rebasing", which was one of my personal highlights of the conference.
Notes from many of the breakouts can be found in the conference's GitHub repo.
Contributor Summit
In addition to these unconf talks, there were over 20 core contributors who organized their own internal catchup on topics ranging from Git 3.0, to incorporating Rust code in core Git, to moving git-scm.com to being a fully static site (which is now done!)
You can read through the detailed notes of those talks on the Git mailing list.
Winter Wrap Up
Of course, no event in Berlin that I help put on is complete without taking some of the core contributors out to karaoke, so we got to hear Peff do an outstanding Elvis, Taylor tackle some 90s hip hop, myself throw down Despacito and much, much more.
These videos will not be put on our YouTube channel.
Overall, the conference was fantastic. So many people came up to me and said it was one of the best conferences they've been to, which meant a lot to us. I learned a ton and I'm glad so many others did as well.
Props to Anne, Megan, Pavel and Pat at GitButler for doing all of the hard work, as well as all of our speakers and core contributors for making the trip out here to share with us all.
I hope GitButler can be a part of making sure Git Merge continues to happen in the future, and I can't thank Taylor and GitHub enough for helping us get this done. Also a big thanks to GerritForge for sponsoring the afterparty!
Until next year!