My foray into the Dev World; Dev Bootcamp Phase 0, Week 1

Sometimes, the easiest way to get a new language you’re learning to stick, is to create connections to what you already know. This is a trick I’ve definitely had to use as I made it through my first week at DevBootcamp.

So far, we surveyed our tech scene, checked if it was safe and ready to support us in our work, and jumped right into the terminal!

Busting out moves in the command line felt like a blast from my past, having grown up with a DOS computer, floppy disks, ZORK, and BBS systems. where the learning curve came from was understanding what GIT was, and how to use it with GITHUB.

Though I have yet to learn what GIT itself acutally means, I have become very familiar with why it is so important do developers to use. GIT is a Version Control System. it allows you to take everything you do with your code, and keep a detailed track of each change. Now, we all know how it feels to have created a massively custom document, usually something like a resume, fine-tuned to the very spacing of the page, and revisited that document a few months, or years later, and had the gut wrenching feeling that you’re not EVER going to get it updated and keep it looking the same??

Git helps you understand all the steps you took in making that complex document, with easy notes to help you understand what you were thinking at the time you added that fuschia symbol between your summary, and work experience, and what steps happened before and after that.

Even more, Git allows you to take a step or two, or 100 backward, if you so choose, to get back to a simpler time in your document, without having to start all over.

When it comes to writing complex documents like resumes, or code, there’s nothing more important than having another set of eyes, helping you out. git also gives you that functionality by letting you track your changes, and then making you document each step and committing to those changes, before merging them into the newest version. That way, if you make a few mistakes, they can be caught before they end up making you look like a fool, or even worse, introducing the feared BUG into your CODE!

So, Git sounds like a great way to keep your code in order, but what about having other people working on that same code with you, in a team? So if Git is like a great version of Microsoft word, then GitHub is like a super organized version of Google Docs! When you upload your repository (which is basically like a folder of all your code files) to github and allow others to contribute to it, and github manages your files, and helps you to store and view your code and the version history. Using Github promotes collaboration with ease, and we all know that when we build together, amazing things happen!

so git out there, and git it girl!

Tags Git, Github, Winning, DBCgit