This week in our miniseries on learning the version control system Git, Bart dips our proverbial toe into branching. Branches allow us, as developers, to work on bugs or feature enhancements in a separate place from our stable code, and only merge the code back in when the bugs are squashed or the features are stable.
We don’t get much practice in this instalment, but rather Bart talks to us about the idea of having a strategy for when to branch and how to name your branches in order to prevent chaos. He gives us some simple and yet difficult to adhere to strategies and then takes us through more rigorous strategies that will actually be easier to follow. He emphasizes that he’s not telling us which strategy to follow, but rather to have a strategy.
We do a few small examples from the command line, but we get to open our Git GUI clients, like GitKraken and Sourcetree and see how the commands we’re typing are graphically represented in the clients. It’s a good illustration of what Bart has been promising us – that the GUI clients are doing exactly what the command line is doing.
You can find Bart’s tutorial shownotes at https://pbs.bartificer.net/pbs107. And if you’d like to support Bart on Patreon, go to patreon.com/ltpod.
I love your podcast. I’m only on the second one and I just started programming. Your ability to make things simple shows me how well you know your stuff. I thank you so much for doing this. I will be listening to every single one of these.
So glad you like Bart’s style, Darby! Have fun with it. We have a Slack group with a channel called #pbs just for talking to people about programming and the show in particular. Come join us! https://Podfeet.com/slack