Behind the Commit: The internals of Git

Tom Wetjens

Git feels like magic—until it doesn’t. When merge conflicts arise, branches disappear, or history gets tangled, understanding Git’s internal architecture transforms you from a Stack Overflow-follower into a Git guru.

This talk peels back the porcelain commands to reveal Git’s elegant foundation: a content-addressable filesystem built on cryptographic hashing, where commits are just nodes in a graph and branches are merely moveable pointers. We’ll explore how Git stores different object types (blobs, trees, commits, and tags) and how that makes complex operations more intuitive and what happens under the hood when you branch, commit and merge.

After this you never have to Google a git command again!

I have presented this talk at:

  • Energie Data Services Nederland (2023)

Behind the Commit: The internals of Git (slides, PDF)