Unix, Git, and Source Control with Palantir's Former Director of Engineering
Plus: Why four UATX roommates taught themselves to weld, wire, and machine.
This is the second class in Andy Aymeloglu’s spring 2026 course, Software Engineering.
Andy Aymeloglu was Director of Engineering at Palantir Technologies from 2005 to 2015, growing it from a fledgling company to an 1800-person company with offices across the globe. He has since served as VP of Engineering at Hexagon Bio, Alcor member, and Founding Partner at Commit Capital, while advising startups in the Bay Area.
Rather than offering a list of commands to memorize, this class builds a mental model of the terminal, beginning with the anatomy of a Unix command and walking through file navigation, grep, pipes, redirects, and shell scripting. The second half of class focuses on Git internals. What actually happens when you run git commit? What lives inside that .git folder? How do commits, trees, and blobs form a directed acyclic graph, and why does the cryptographic structure underpinning Git also underpin blockchains? By the end, you will have a clear grasp of the commands you've been running for years, and know how to dig out issues when they arise.
This lecture was recorded at UATX on April 2, 2026.
00:00 — Why learn the CLI?
01:18 — Anatomy of a command
02:23 — How to navigate the file system
08:25 — How to control where the output goes
09:35 — Setting up the chat-app
11:54 — The command loved by Linux users
13:45 — Shell scripts
18:23 — Another way to put commands together
21:56 — A practical exercise: find this file
23:49 — Key takeaways
25:07 — How git actually works
33:05 — Commits, trees, and blobs
34:43 — Inspecting git objects
35:24 — What branches enable you to do
37:15 — What git checkout actually does
42:59 — Building the commit graph
48:12 — How to use merge and rebase
52:55 — Rebase's golden rule
Spotlight: UATX Engineers
Four roommates from UATX’s inaugural class showed up to college in fall 2024 to study philosophy and history. They read Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft and decided a one-year-old university needed to get its hands dirty.
They taught themselves to weld, wire, and machine. A year later, with no engineering background, they had designed and built most of a 7,000-lb tunnel boring machine from scratch, and competed at the Boring Company competition. A final three-week crunch ended with their tents blowing off the site in a thunderstorm on the big day.
The machine wasn’t finished by then. But the Boring Company inspectors were impressed enough that two of the students (Eitan and Sam) landed engineering internships there this summer.
We’re already receiving apps for Fall 2027. It’s not too early — apply now.
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