My first software job, I was a junior person, and every Friday, we would have The Merge, where we'd merge every SVN branch into trunk. We always spoke of it like it was this dreadful proper noun, like Voldemort or something.

The junior engineers were the ones doing this, and generally my entire day would be spent fixing merge conflicts. Usually they were easy to resolve, but occasionally I'd hit one that would take me a very long time (it didn't help that I was still pretty inexperienced and consequently these things were just sort of inherently harder for me). I just assumed that this was the way that the world was until I found `git-svn`.

`git-svn` made a task that often took an entire day take something like 45 minutes, usually much less. It was like a light shining down from heaven; I absolutely hated doing The Merge, and this just made it mostly a solved problem.

After that job, I sort of drew a soft line in the sand that I will not work with SVN again, because at that point I knew that merging could be less terrible. I wasn't necessarily married to git in particular, but I knew that whatever the hell it was that SVN was doing, I didn't like it.