JJ Con 2026 - How to Accidentally Create a Graph-based Version Control System - Nick Gerace

From 2023 through 2025, the team at System Initiative created and maintained a graph-based storage layer to represent an entire company's infrastructure via digital twin representation. Starting with immutable directed acyclic graphs and copy-on-write semantics, the system grew to support automatic rebasing, operational transforms, and downstream materialized views. Only looking back was it obvious that the team had created their very own Rust-based version control system — arguably by accident. This session takes you along the journey of the system's origins, how it worked, and how you too can build a distributed, graph-based version control system at home... but please don't. #tech #opensource #jjvcs #jjcon