Probably, some of you know the story of two British salesmen who were sent to Africa in the 1900’s to see if there were any opportunities to sell shoes. The salesmen wrote telegrams back to their colleagues in Britain and one of them wrote, “Situation hopeless. They don’t wear shoes.” And the other salesman wrote, “Glorious opportunity. They don’t have any shoes yet.”
– From the script of Benjamin Zander in TED conferences.
Something similar happens in the development area, in particular in the Version Control System (VCS), because if we don’t use Git yet, that only means we have a tremendous opportunity to use one of the most powerful tools we have currently, save a lot of time in managing code and be happy with a better workflow.
I consider myself a person who always is searching, learning and implementing new ways to create code, so, when I started to learn about how to improve my workflow and quality in development introducing a VCS -some years ago- , my first choice was SVN (maybe, because that one was the only one available for me at that moment). Last year, after taking some courses and listening a Linus Torvals’ conference, I decided to start to migrate my personal repositories into Git…
After testing and using Git, I would like to say I really loved it, it was easier to understand than SVN or CVS, it allowed me to manage my repositories in a better way and saved me a lot of time (let’s face it, I didn’t enjoy the merging process in CVS for CNH projects).
But, maybe my favorite feature in Git -and its platforms- is that Git was created to be totally social and express the sense of community; let me tell you about it: when I heard about platforms like Github, Bitbucket (or Stash) by Attlassian, I realized Git would be the future in the VCS area because it would give us the real sense of teamwork and community and I was right!
Just to give you an idea: at the end of 2013 Github announced the creation of the 10 millionth repository https://github.com/blog/1724-
Now, if you are wondering what is the state of the art in the Enterprise World, well, Atlassian has created two very good tools, one of them is Bitbucket (which I use for personal projects) and Stash which is a kind of the enterprise version of Bitbucket. Stash can be integrated to JIRA (which would improve even more our development).
So, why I am telling you all this and maybe using your time for reading my post?
My answer is simple: because you have to know Git, is wonderful!
In a nutshell, I invite you to learn Git, collaborate in Github community projects and come with us on the way for knowing a better world!
Regards.