My favourite recent addition to Git Rev News is the developer spotlight interviews.<p>This edition&#x27;s spotlight on Matthieu Moy is really interesting, as he talks about some of the changes he has helped implement in git, particularly in the user interface.<p><i>Q: How did you start getting involved with Git?<p>A: My first non-trivial contribution to free software was on version-control, before Git existed. I got involved in GNU Arch, then its fork Bazaar 1.x. And then GNU Arch and Bazaar 1.x died, and I moved on to something else. At the same time, I started teaching version-control, hated centralized systems enough to migrate to Git. Teaching Git in 2009 was a funny experience: the tool was starting to get a decent user-interface, but was lacking a lot of polishing. One of my favorite examples is what happens when you push to a remote that has commits that you don&#x27;t have locally. Initially, users were getting a message like:</i><p><pre><code>    ! [rejected]        master -&gt; master (non-fast-forward)
</code></pre>
<i>I wrote a rather straightforward patch to change it to:</i><p><pre><code>    ! [rejected]        master -&gt; master (non-fast-forward)
    To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates were rejected.
    Merge the remote changes before pushing again.
    See &#x27;non-fast forward&#x27; section of &#x27;git push --help&#x27; for details.
</code></pre>
<i>The students went from &quot;Huh?&quot; to &quot;Wow, a 3-lines long message, that&#x27;s long. What shall I do now (given that reading the actual doc is not an option)?&quot;. Then, I added an explicit mention of &quot;git pull&quot; in the message, and the situation became manageable for most students. Many of my contributions to Git follow this principle: see what users have difficulties with, and try to improve the tool to help them. In many cases, a staightforward patch to improve the error message was sufficient: in case of error, explain what&#x27;s going on to the user, and give the way out (&quot;did you mean: ...?&quot; or &quot;use ... to ...&quot;).</i>