Git around me

I have made the move to Git, no surprise there. I have read a lot in the past few months about a “mature” web development work flow with everyone running sites locally, using version control and how bad it was “white screening” a live site. I had already made the switch (and never looked back) to pre-processing my CSS, but GitHub, the command-line (yeh… I’m on windows) and syncing databases where stopping me from going local.

To be honest, Git intimidated me. I know it’s not in Git’s intention to come across that way, but the learning curve had been a real stopper for me. I tried Git about two times before bailing, there was too much to take on at first. I did some demo’s and tutorials but it was all too much. I’m also not the best with typos, I typed in git comment -m ‘first’ and was scratching me head why it wasn’t working, so me and the command line didn’t always get along. I was also a bit worried about commiting bad code, but after reading there are a metric ass-load of repos out there, no one is looking at yours¹ it gave me some perspective.

After a few months and failed attempts I sucked it up after finding this guy. GitHub for windows is sweet and really helps the learning. I’m still not 100% with terms and work flow etc, as I haven’t done any collaborative work so its just basic commits for the time being, but it is helping. The GUI takes care of all the terms I am not familiar with yet and still allows me to branch, push and pull.

It’s early days yet, but a local work flow hosted on GitHub really makes sense. I love open source, and as this blog will run on Jekyll, it made such sense to host it on GitHub and let it take care of my version control. So if, like me, you are wanting to move off FTP and live-edits to a site, but are overwhelmed by the learning curve and terminology of Git (or other version control), just make the change.

Moar links

• Getting the hang of Git
• Code School
• Official help