When working on local clones, many objects come into existence that only make sense on then local system (like editor / IDE configurations and backup files) or should not be shared as they may expose data of the local system (like the .DS_Store files that the MacOS creates).

This git ignore file shields against typical unwanted files and is kept minimal.

We can always add further ignore patterns later, but this should be a better start than relying on the implicit ignore rules of git.