Last week, GitButler descended on Amsterdam to attend the Git Mini Summit, featuring speakers from around the world on a wide range of all things Git. We've uploaded the talks to YouTube on our channel so you can enjoy all the content you missed if you happened to not be at the hottest party in town.
The GitButler CLI
I started the conference off with a sneak peek at the new GitButler command line interface that we are currently working on. Check out how cool this is going to be:
Reftable Backend
The infamous Patrick Steinhart (we now call him "Steiny") of Bits and Booze: Mailing Lists fame spoke about the new way Git can store your references ("reftables"), which will become the new default when Git 3.0 lands. He also goes into how they've made it super fast since it was first introduced.
Branching in a Monorepo
Next up we have a talk about branching in a monorepo from Mark Juggurnauth-Thomas of Meta. Mark talks about new tooling built into Meta's Sapling tool that allows you to branch by copying directories, why that's cool, and the special tooling and metadata needed to make that happen.
Git at High Speed
Luca Milanesio of GerritForge talked about making Git repositories fast with their GHS (Git at High Speed) tooling, optimizing bitmaps, refs organization and packfile pruning to keep very large repositories as fast as possible.
Extending Git without Breaking it
The last talk was from Adrian Ratiu from Collabora on his experiences in trying to upstream new changes into Git core, specifically changes to submodule path encoding and sequential hooks execution and how he's approaching these goals without breaking things (too much).
Closing Panel Discussion
Finally we closed with a panel talk featuring Emily Shaffer from Google, Daniele Sassoli from GerritForge, and Patrick Steinhardt ("Steiny") and Karthik Nayak from GitLab. They addressed a number of questions from the audience, including how to involve more people in contributing to Git, how to make commit messages more important, the needs of the project now that it's over 20 years old and more.
You can also enjoy me grabbing the mic in order to inject my own opinions about things.
Wrapup
We also walked everyone over to the nearby beer garden to share some pints and continue the conversation.
After party at GMS 2025, AMS
That's it for Git Mini Summit 2025, Amsterdam Edition. We'll see you all at the end of the month for the main event, Git Merge 2025 at the GitHub HQ in San Francisco!
Ah, the mini summit
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