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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • Very good article for folks who’ve had to teach juniors/trainees Git before.

    This is, to my mind, one of the greatest advantages of git (and, by-the-by, also automated testing): the added security that being able to restore to an earlier state whenever you need to allows you to take more risks and try more things when building software.

    Yeah, I always tell them it’s like checkpoints or like a save in a game.

    But this also ties into the needing-a-teacher aspect to properly learn Git: Due to the nature of what Git accomplishes, it has a lot of complex failure modes. And at the start, you need a teacher to get you through those.

    The worst-case is if they start dreading merges, because they can’t past them and then they try to merge less often, which makes the conflicts so much harder to deal with.
    Or if they can’t get past merge conflicts and stop seeing the point in small Git commits and in good commit messages. That also makes merge conflicts so much worse.

    That’s kind of my motivation to be good at Git. I need to be able to tell juniors, that if they’ve created a commit, then we can unfuck the repo no matter what they might do wrong.