My Outreachy Internship Experience at Git

I successfully completed my three-month Outreachy internship at Git.

On November 12, 2024, I received an email from Outreachy informing me that I had been selected for two projects—LibreOffice (C++) and Git (C). This means I was contributing to two organizations during the contribution period as that is the requirement before someone can get selected for any organization. Getting selected for one Outreachy project is already competitive, but securing two, especially with large and not so easy codebases, was an even bigger challenge.These two organizations also do not use GitHub. Git uses mailing lists, and LibreOffice uses Gerrit, both of which require a learning curve. I managed to pull this off while being a student.

I ultimately chose to intern with Git under the mentorship of Christian Couder from GitLab. My project was to extend the Git v2 protocol by adding OS name to the agent string (e.g., "git/1.8.3.1" → "git/1.8.3.1-Linux"), improving debugging, security monitoring, and upgrade recommendations. This allows Git clients (e.g., personal computers) and Git servers (e.g., GitHub, GitLab) to share OS information when exchanging requests.

After multiple iterations and discussions with the Git community, my contributions were merged into Git’s master branch. One major challenge was handling differences between uname(1) (command-line utility) and uname(2) (system call) on Windows, complicating testing. I successfully resolved this issue.

Upon completing my project, I started contributing to refactoring Git’s codebase to reduce reliance on global variables, specifically removing the_repository and replacing it with explicit repository arguments. This improves modularity, maintainability, and testability. This effort has been ongoing within Git, and I have successfully submitted and merged several patches.

I am incredibly grateful to Outreachy for this opportunity and to my mentor Christian Couder, who guided me throughout the internship, patiently answering my questions and explaining both Git internals and broader technical concepts. I also appreciate Taylor Blau (Git coordinator) and Junio Hamano (Git maintainer) for reviewing my patches and mentoring me until I produced high-quality contributions.

Additionally, I’d like to thank Git contributors Jialuo She, Patrick, Eric Sunshine, Philip Wood, and Kartik for their help. Special thanks to Tilda Udufo, Samuel Iglesias Gonsálvez, and Dustin for informal chats that provided valuable insights. I’m also grateful to GitLab and GitHub for sponsoring Outreachy and allowing my mentor to support me.

Lastly, I appreciate Plaksha University and ALX Africa for introducing me to C, C++, and Bash scripting, and Kunal Kushwaha for his open-source education.

I am open to collaborating on interesting projects—feel free to reach out.

My patches discussions on the Git Mailing list:- https://lnkd.in/gnSgfRN8

My blogposts about my internship :- https://lnkd.in/ghXq5bEX