Edward Thomson

One of the unique features about a DVCS - like Git - is that it gives you portability of your repository. Unlike a centralized version control system, where you get started by doing a checkout or a get latest of the remote code, with Git you do a clone. This name is carefully chosen: you are actually getting a full copy of the repository, with all the history, the branches and the tags.

Over the last few months, I've been trying to take a more broad view of DevOps. I've been working on Git for a bunch of years, and other version control systems for many more, so that will always be my home. But lately, I've been thinking a lot about build and release pipelines. So last weekend I decided to work on a fun project: using Probot to build a GitHub app that integrates with the Visual Studio Team Services build pipelines.

Six years ago, Microsoft bought the tiny company that I worked for and moved five of us out of a cornfield in Central Illinois and into the largest software company in the world. In that time, I've done some unlikely things like hack on obscure Unix systems, write a bunch of GPL-licensed code and helped bring distributed version control into Microsoft.