Writing

Notes on systems, data, and building things that expose their own reasoning.

After stripping GitHub down to SSH and a bare repository, the product becomes clearer: GitHub sells the collaboration system around Git.

Pull requests are not Git

Git gives us branches, diffs, patches, and merges. A pull request is the collaboration object GitHub built around them.

Server-side hooks turn a dumb Git remote into something that can enforce policy before history changes.

A push is not a folder upload. It is Git sending missing objects and asking the remote to move a branch reference.

A small GitHub without GitHub: one Linux box, one bare repository, and the first useful boundary between Git and the product built around it.