I've been using Git for years. Committing, pushing, pulling, occasionally panicking when things... Tagged with git, rust, tutorial, beginners.

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A developer built Veridian, a simplified version control system in Rust, to understand Git's internals. Git is fundamentally a content-addressable storage system using three object types: blobs (file contents), trees (directory listings), and commits (snapshots with metadata). All objects are stored as SHA-1 hashed, zlib-compressed files in .git/objects. Branches are just text files containing commit hashes. The project revealed that Git's complexity comes from how it's taught, not its underlying architecture. Building a basic version control system with init, hash-object, write-tree, and commit-tree commands provides deeper understanding than reading documentation.

I Built Git from Scratch to Finally Understand What I've Been Using for Years