Derrick Stolee is a Principal Software Engineer at GitHub, where he focuses on the client experience of large Git repositories.

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Subscribers might be aware that I’ve done some work on client-side Git in the past, so I was pretty excited for this episode. We discuss the Microsoft Windows and Office repository’s migrations to Git, recent performance improvements to Git for large monorepo, and more.

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Highlights

lightly edited

[06:00] Utsav: How and why did you transition from academia to software engineering?

Derrick Stolee: I was teaching and doing research at a high level and working with really great people. And I found myself not finding the time to do the work I was doing as a graduate student. I wasn't finding time to do the programming and do these really deep projects. I found that the only time I could find to do that was in the evenings and weekends because that's when other people weren't working, who could collaborate with me on their projects and move those projects forward. And then, I had a child and suddenly my evenings and weekends aren't available for that anymore.

And so the individual things I was doing just for myself and for, you know, that was more programming oriented, fell by the wayside. I'd found myself a lot less happy with that career. And so I decided, you know what, there are two approaches I could take here. One is I could spend the next year or two winding down my collaborations and spinning up more of this time to be working on my own during regular work hours. Or I could find another job and I was going to set out.

And, I lucked out that Microsoft has an office here in Raleigh, North Carolina, where we now live. This is where Azure DevOps was being built and they needed someone to help solve some graph problems. So it was really nice that it happened to work out that way. I know for a fact that they took a chance on me because of their particular need. I didn't have significant professional experience in the industry.

[21:00] Utsav: What drove the decision to migrate Windows to Git?

The Windows repository moving to Git was a big project driven by Brian Harry, who was the CVP of Azure DevOps at the time. Previously, Windows used this source control system called Source Depot, which was a fork of Perforce. No one knew how to use this version control system until they got there and learned on the job, and that caused some friction in terms of onboarding people.

But also if you have people working in the windows code base for a long time, they only learn this version control system. They don't know Git and they don't know what everyone else is using. And so they're feeling like they're falling behind and they're not speaking the same language when they talk to somebody else who's working commonly used version control tools. So they saw this as a way to not only update the way their source control works to a more modern tool but specifically allow this more free exchange of ideas and understanding.

The Windows Git repository is going to be big and have some little tweaks here and there, but at the end of the day, you're just running Git commands and you can go look at StackOverflow to solve questions as opposed to needing to talk to specific people within the Windows organization and how to use this version control tool.

The full transcript will be uploaded shortly!

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