28 Jan 2015

I'm Git'n it

Git good. Svn bad.

But in all seriousness:
I’ve been using git since end of my Sophmore year of college. Some students encouraged me to make a Github account and start working on open source projects or personal projects. I created the account and learned some of the git basics, but I didn’t really start using it until my senior year. I really started trying to encourage myself to create small side projects or look at open source code. My most recent goal has been to commit something to github at least once a day. I’m currently on a 38 day streak.

Otherwise, git and github have been great for keeping myself and my code organized. It’s good to know that I have my code stored somewhere remote in case of anything happening to my system. And it helps to be able to screw around and make big changes without worrying about breaking everything or being unable to turn back the clock.

At this point the basic workcycle has been etched into my mind and I can’t imagine working any other way. Luckily this kind of workflow is very widely utilized in the industry.

Git vs SVN

The first time I used SVN was for the previous semester’s software engineering course. Honestly, I found it a bit clunkier than Git. It didn’t seem to flow as nicely and it didn’t have as nice of a feature set and documentation as git. That being said, I’m glad I learned it, even if I doubt I’ll ever willingly use it in the future.

Git feels good to use, the commands and workflow seem intuitive to me. It’s also a huge bonus that there are websites like github, gitlabs, and bitbucket that provide remote hosting for repositories. Now, most of these aren’t git exclusive, but they just work better with git.

Github

A lot of people tend to group git and github as the same thing. This is a mistake, it needs to be taught that they are not the same. Git is a FOSS distributed version control system. Github is a web-based git repository hosting system. Now I can see why people confuse the two, github boasts an impressive set of tools such as their github client, that can help manage repositories and git commits. But github is not the end all be all for web-based hosting sites. I think it’s important that people realize git is a standalone system as far as version control.

I also believe that use of a GUI client to begin with is…not good. Learning to use git through a terminal initially will give you a better understanding of what’s happening. Starting out with a client can obscure what’s happening behind the scenes, leading to a shallow understanding.

Laura Barber at 6:22PM