12 GB Git Repo. Passwords in Commit History. Stale Branches. We Fixed It Live.

Massively bloated. That is the only way to describe this Git repository. Clone time? Forget about it. Build time? Eternity. Binary artifacts committed to Git. Thousands of stale branches. Passwords buried in old commits. The full cleanup: BFG Repo Cleaner, pipeline optimization, and the guardrails that prevent it from ever happening again. When I started digging into this 12 GB repo the picture got worse fast: JARs, ZIPs, even Docker images committed directly to Git, thousands of stale branches dead for years, and actual passwords and API keys sitting in old commit history. The repo was not just bloated - it was a security risk that had been quietly sitting there the whole time. The cleanup was surgery: BFG Repo Cleaner to strip binaries from history, every large file migrated to a proper artifact registry, secrets rotated and then scrubbed from every commit. Then the CI pipeline itself got restructured - sequential stages split into parallel, Docker layer caching added, selective testing so only affected modules run. The guardrails that prevent it from growing back: pre-commit hooks blocking files over 5MB, branch lifecycle policy with auto-delete 7 days after merge, secret…