There is no such command as “git fear”, so why are we so scared of GIT?

2019-02-07 11:32 pm

Over the past couple years, I’ve been on a personal mission to eliminate fear of GIT for myself and others.As such, I wanted to share a couple of GIT tools today that I’ve found in my journey.These tools help me to learn and be confident with GIT commands.

These tools range from teaching tools to tools that allow us to visualize our operations, and I think you’ll find they are useful to eliminate the “fear” or uncertainty you might be feeling before trying to perform a rebase, cherry-pick, or even a merge from one branch to another.For me, I’ve been able to utilize a couple of these tools to literally perform the commands in a safe place before running them on the actual repository.

So what are my favorite go-to tools and resources that I think you should check out?

Explain GIT with d3
This is my favorite tool.It’s a live playground that let’s you run any scenario to see how the repository would respond to your commands.It’s lightweight and easy to learn and use, and gives great practice with basic git commands in the process.
Learning GIT Branching
I’ll admit, I haven’t done this one fully through, as I just heard about it a couple of weeks ago from one of my students.So far, however, I am super impressed at the ability of this tool to teach and respond to your commands as you learn.
Atlassian Bitbucket GIT Tutorial
Bitbucket was my go-to repository of choice for private repos (ok, it still is).Atlassian has an entire set of tools for software developers and teams, but they have also done a great job around the bitbucket ecosystem and this tutorial provides solid examples on almost every situation you’ll encounter.
Backlog GIT tutorial
I wasn’t expecting to find such a nugget of gold when I stumbled upon Backlog.I needed a place where I could point my students to do project management tasks for our CS Practicum at Franklin University, and I found Backlog.Little did I know at the time, I would find one of the most elegant and easy-to-use GIT tutorials available, along with a fantastic tool for project management.
Readify GitViz
I first learned of this tool from a cool cat named Arthur Doler at Prairie Code in Des Moines in one of his awesome talks covering GIT. This tool has become something I turn to when I need to quickly visualize my local repository (it’s much cleaner than git log –oneline –graph –decorate).To get GitViz working after download/clone of the repository, you do need visual studio and a bit of understanding about building a solution in .Net. Also, don’t forget to search the code and set the path to GIT to your actual GIT installation path, or GitViz won’t work -- and that’s just no fun.
GIT Documentation
It is not really possible to use GIT to its fullest extent without checking out the documentation.There are some tricky things about the documentation that can be a bit daunting at first, but once you combine the other tools above and a little experience with the documentation, things become much more clear very quickly.

What are some of the best tools and resources you’ve used to learn GIT and overcome your fear/uncertainty?

Categories: : GIT