blackbox/docs/why-is-this-important.md

Why encrypt your secrets?

OBVIOUSLY we don't want secret things like SSL private keys and passwords to be leaked.

NOT SO OBVIOUSLY when we store "secrets" in a VCS repo like Git or Mercurial, suddenly we are less able to share our code with other people. Communication between subteams of an organization is hurt. You can't collaborate as well. Either you find yourself emailing individual files around (yuck!), making a special repo with just the files needed by your collaborators (yuck!!), or just deciding that collaboration isn't worth all that effort (yuck!!!).

The ability to be open and transparent about our code, with the exception of a few specific files, is key to the kind of collaboration that DevOps and modern IT practitioners need to do.