WHAT WOULD SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS DO WITHOUT GIT?
Today is the third day of the Andela cycle 32 Bootcamp and I am about to be a full stack developer. This would sound so easy to some people but to me it means a lot. I started feeling the pressure of the Andela cycle 32 Bootcamp right from home. As an Android developer that had about three (3) months to learn Beginners Android development from the Andela Learning Community and about four (4) months to conclude the Android Intermediate Track, I could say I had never done fast-paced learning such as this before.
Two weeks to the bootcamp, I got a mail and its content was the bootcamp preparatory material, I scanned through the document and felt it would be a smooth ride. Few days later, came the first challenge which was very much okay. It did not take much time to wrap my head around the AGILE methodology tool that was specified in the week 1 challenge; the Pivotal Tracker. The first thing was to create user stories on pivotal tracker that would specify user experiences on the web app I was to work on, the user stories captured the features of the app as well as bugs that came later on. It is a very valuable tool where teams can collaborate and deliver software products effectively.
During the course of the second project challenge, I finally met node.js/express. As I got to understand more about web services and making HTTP calls, I found that express was a friendlier tool to use. I went through some resources found in the bootcamp challenge preparatory document and by the time I finished, I had a working server set up on my system with routes for API endpoints which were actually working.
While still trying to wrap my head around node.js and express, I met POSTMAN, the awesome tool for testing API endpoints. All these were a bit overwhelming at first, but at the time of writing this, I see POSTMAN as my everyday application and this made me wonder why I had never known or used it.
All these tools and technology were totally new to me yet they were not as interesting as GIT, a version control system used by software developers for tracking changes in computer files and coordinating work on those files. I thought I knew all there was to know about GIT but I was about to find out I actually knew nothing. I got to know that there is a recommended ‘work-flow’ when using GIT and a way to structure a commit message. I later discovered that my phobia of using the ‘git pull’ command which always led me to back-up my files locally was not necessary, as long as you had made the necessary commits and then there is the ‘revert’ command. One of the two GIT features that got to me was using the ‘gh-pages’ branch to set up a Github page; where I hosted my UI templates online, It was awesome. The other feature was the ‘pull request feature’. I got to know that pull requests are made when a review is necessary; this allows a team to work together. Code can be reviewed either by the project owner or someone else before a merge is made. Using GIT is just as important as writing the codes, this made me wonder what software developers would actually do without GIT. With all these, I can say Andela is a fast-paced learning center, and I have learnt a lot.
