Git on vnykmshr

Git log as archaeology

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The source file you’re looking at is a summary. The history is the full document. Most of the time you don’t care – you’re working on the current shape of the code and the summary is enough. But sometimes the current shape stops answering.

I reach for git history during RCAs, bug hunts, and questions the code can’t answer from its current form. Why is this file organised this way? Who introduced this assumption? When did this fallback stop being a fallback and start being the main path? The commit log knows. The current source doesn’t.

Git history with Gource

Sat, 07 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’d been watching YouTube videos of Gource visualizations – Git, Homebrew, Node.js. Each commit becomes a moment in time, files branch out like a digital organism, contributors appear and disappear. Months of development condensed into a few minutes of organic growth.

I pointed it at my blog’s git repository. Here’s what came out.

Setup

On macOS, Homebrew handles everything:

brew update
brew install gource ffmpeg

The command that generates a video from a git repo:

History as communication

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Most teams treat git history as a side effect. You work, you commit, whatever ends up in the log is the log. Merge commits pile up. “WIP” and “fix typo” and “actually working now” sit next to meaningful changes. The history is technically accurate but communicates nothing.

The alternative: treat history as something you write, not something that happens to you. The commit log is the one piece of documentation that’s always in sync with the code – because it is the code’s changelog. If the history is incoherent, you’ve wasted that.

Starting over

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Every now and then you want to start over. This blog was long overdue for it. Feels good to tear it down and rebuild.

The old setup was WordPress on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. NFSN deserves credit – their pay-as-you-go model is honest and the value is real. But WordPress started feeling like a constraint. I spend my days building custom solutions. Using a one-size-fits-all CMS for my own site felt wrong.

So I built a blog engine.