The broad shoulders of giants

As I was updating my website and its posts, I looked at the right-hand corner of the repo info in Github. I was suddenly surprised to see a boatload of other avatars hanging out there, maybe about 20 or more.

I’m not used to seeing so many collaborators since I’m mostly working on solo projects, so this caught me off guard for a moment. Maybe I was working on the wrong repo or I’d made a mistake? But no, still the same lonely repo as ever. Huh?

Oh right. Way back when, this site was forked from poole, which unfortunately hasn’t seen a lot of movement latelyBut why? Is it the case that this software is “finished” (meaning it has reached its terminus and there is no more work needed for it to fulfill its purpose)? I am inclined to say no, for various reasons. For one, this is on top of Jekyll, which is a Ruby project. This means there are about looks at Gemfile.lock a bunch of dependencies and the surface area of attack/updates/bugfixes seems pretty big. Then, has it fallen into disuse? Well, maybe this particular flavor, but Jekyll still seems to be alive and well. That is, if you count 100+ issues as a good indication of quality? In any case, either this particular project has gone into abandon, or @mdo has willfully refused to make any updates and keep it up to date with Jekyll.

. However, I decided to retain all the Git commits for fun, and therefore I have a clear view into the project since inception.

One way of thinking of this, is that I have a full and clear view of all the collaborations that made my work possible, starting from the very beginning. Of course, there are even more collaborations to which I won’t ever be privy, and that jump away from version control and into real lifeHere I’d like to imagine @mdo on Dec 23, 2013 at 9:39 PM checking in commit 633aed1 after, say, a walk in a nice park that day. However, who’s to say the chain of events that led to their inspiration/work/effort put in that resulted in that initial commit?

. But the net effect is that it draws attention to the long, storied past of people who in their spare time and with no monetary compensation provided the tools for me to write bad prose online.

All told, there are 23 contributors to my own website - even though I no longer use the original framework and it is effectively unrelated from that particular project. These are even before I start looking at the number of collaborators from Jekyll itselfwhich is where Poole got forked, even though the original commit history was not retained. Yes, I know there are practical considerations with keeping absurd amount of historical commits with Git. But still…

and I’m sure theres a lot of collaborators there too. What would happen if we had a near-perfect window into the history of collaborations further into the past?

What if we could peer even further back, in an uninterrupted multidimensional scale, across all of our software? The capability of looking at all the sources of software alone that led into our puny little project would be awe-inspiring, no doubtJust think of all the libraries, dependencies and binaries that it takes to run any given program at all.

. What about our entire collective knowledge and efforts?

I think it would cause an utterly unbearable sense of immensity. It would be like having an entire universe of mankind’s perfectly-indexed work laid at our feet, a majestic pyramid built with the strain of millions of souls before us. An incomprehensible, gargantuan artifact daring us to produce something worthy of addition to its insatiable being. In this fever dream, the burden of placing another brick on the ziggurat of Time begins to take on a quasi-religious quality now that we can see with clarity all the work leading up to this very moment: you.

This thought experiment certainly has a lot of cloth to cut for interesting essays and short stories. But more importantly in my opinion, it offers a kernel of truth at its core.

Tracing, understanding and feeling the connection we have with the work of those before us is empowering. We can derive a sense of belonging, of becoming a part of something bigger than ourselves, no matter how small a contribution. It invites feelings of gratitude for the knowledge and wisdom we use without effort. It enables compassion towards those who come after, offering our own work in kind and recognizing the weight of responsibility as another “name” gets added to the “list”.

And version control offers a tiny, yet meaningful, dosage of that effect.