Out of (Version) Control!

15 Sep 2016

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My first experience with Github was during a hackathon. I was intimidated, because I wasn’t too confident in my application development skills. However, one of the speakers demonstrated the value of hackathons as a growing experience for practicing skills not often used in a more relaxed development environment. Though I struggled to understand all the different development tools mentioned, I learned a great deal that weekend.

Throughout my experiences with various files and projects, I’ve found great value in the version control aspect of configuration management. Without version control, my files of the same iterated projects quickly get confusing, with unwieldy names for each new backup version of a file and crowded folders. I get paranoid about overwriting a working copy with an edit that breaks the code. Being able to revert to older working versions of files makes for quite a stress inducing environment.

I would like to learn to use GIT and Github more effectively from the terminal/command prompt. I currently depend mostly on GUI based interfaces rather than the other options because of my limited experience with command prompts.

If it were possible, I feel like nearly all editable files and documents could benefit from version control.

Currently, I’m trying to put my experience in Github into practical use during the a new hackathon. Our team has an online repository with our project’s code, and we use that to collaborate, even if we are not in the same room together. I still have some issues with Github (like accidentally initiating pull requests on outside of my fork, while I’m just trying to merge my test branch with my master branch). In the future, I hope to collaborate on many more projects using configuration management tools like Github.