rn-8: Add Luke Diamand's interview

Author: chriscool

rev_news/drafts/edition-8.md

@@ -29,6 +29,101 @@ This edition covers what happened during the month of September 2015.
 ### Support
 -->
 
+## Developer Spotlight: Luke Diamand
+
+Q. Who are you, and what do you do?
+
+A. I've been writing software since my uncle got me hooked with a TI-56
+calculator and a TRS-80 model 2. Right now, I'm working for Roku,
+(making cool new video streaming hardware :-) which currently involves
+a lot of fairly low-level digging around in SoC software.
+
+Q. What would you name your most important contribution to Git?
+
+A. My fix to git-p4, to make it stream commits into fast-import,
+rather than buffer them all up in memory first. I did it out of
+desperation.
+
+At the time, I'd just been working for a tiny startup which was also
+making video streaming products, but sadly not making any
+profits. While there, I'd become hooked on git after watching "those"
+videos.
+
+So when I found myself at Broadcom in about 2008, and started trying
+to use Perforce, almost the first thing I did was try to use
+git-p4. But at the time, it read everything into memory using an
+O(n^2) algorithm, which meant it would use up all of the swap space
+available (no matter how much you had) and then crash after a couple
+of days.
+
+These days of course, if you've got a problem the answer is on
+stackoverflow (if you can think of it, it's already been done) but
+back then, we had nothing like that. Eventually I found a patch from
+Andrew Oakley which hinted at the solution. Inspired by this, I taught
+git-p4 to stream commits at fast-import (as the writers of fast-import
+presumably intended) and suddenly I could use git at work. Which was
+completely awesome!
+
+With a good deal of help from Pete Wyckoff and Junio I then got it
+submitted; that process itself was a massive eye opener as to how to
+_really_ review code (and how to write shell script as well).
+
+I spent the next few years trying to encourage everyone else in the
+office to use git and submitted a few more patches to git-p4 along the
+way. We finally switched over, and then the office was closed down!
+
+Which is how it is I now find myself working side-by-side with the
+very same Andrew Oakley who wrote that original patch - he's now at
+Roku as well!
+
+Q. What are you doing on the Git project these days, and why?
+
+A. It's all git-p4 related. I've got a tiny fix that lets you work on
+a detached head; that's just waiting for a bit of bandwidth.
+
+After that, there's a few things I've thought about. It would be very
+handy to be able to turn a P4 shelved changelist into a git commit
+(and vice-versa). And I think it ought to be possible to teach git-p4
+to act in a "daemon" mode, whereby it gets notified of changes and
+automatically pushes them into Perforce, and pulls Perforce changes
+back into git. I've had something like that going in the past but it
+was an ugly hack.
+
+A. If you could get a team of expert developers to work full time on
+something in Git for a full year, what would it be?
+
+Performance on big repos would be nice. Quite a few people have tried
+in the past so maybe it's just impossible, but for example, I did
+wonder if more could be done with cache prefetching (pld instruction
+on ARM) to slurp data into the cache faster. Since I'm pretty much
+completely ignorant of the internals of git, I'm able to be free of
+the boring constraints of reality :-)
+
+And I'd really like a way to painlessly teach people to use git who
+only know about traditional revision control systems (e.g. Perforce).
+
+Q. If you could remove something from Git without worrying about
+backwards compatibility, what would it be?
+
+I think Junio already removed it. That "feature" where git push would
+push all of the branches rather than just HEAD. It had me completely
+confused when I was first starting.
+
+Q. What is your favorite Git-related tool/library, outside of Git
+itself?
+
+I really like Gerrit, although the prolog configuration makes my head
+hurt. And of course Github has to get a mention - it's making git (and
+hence sane version control) ubiquitous. There was a question about it
+the other day on a mountain bike forum I follow!
+
+Q. What is your favourite new feature in git?
+
+`git commit --fixup`
+
+I only found this recently, it's just brilliant. Thank you, whoever it was put that in!
+
+
 ## Releases