La parole est aux speakers: Pauline Vos
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La conférence
The Business of BisectingI've been teaching Git for years, and everywhere I go In this short talk, you'll find out not only what bisect is and how it works, but also all the ways in which it can work for you. From finding a specific point in your history lightning fast, to making it debug for you using a combination of bisect and regression testing. |
Ballroom Hopper / HJK 11/10/2024 11:40-12:20 |
It’s very easy to get started with Git, but the result is that many people are left with a very superficial knowledge of Git. How do you explain this?
I find this to be very true. I think a big part of it is that there’s a lack of resources for best practices. People don’t realize the full potential of Git unless they start rebasing and using atomic commits on a daily basis. And because of the lack of resources, users don’t really know where to start. They’ll hear someone say « oh, you should totally rebase instead of merge, it’s better! », but without the full context of when and why to rebase, they will quickly give up on it because using it will only be frustrating.
And that’s the case for many useful Git features. The Git docs are generated from the man pages and are fairly dry. It doesn’t give you that necessary context. So people have to go out and find people who teach that context, but they won’t until they know there is more context. I think that’s why I’m still teaching Git material after more than six years. It’s evergreen and people don’t realize they need it until they hear about it.
What would you recommend to a new developer discovering Git?
Start with the basics. Learn how to navigate branches, pushing and pulling changes. When you’re comfortable with those things, go and look for resources about best practices. Guess what? You’re now ahead of 90% of your peers when it comes to using Git. Finally, always remember that Git is, above all else, a tool facilitating collaboration. It works best if your team agrees on practices and guidelines. Decide on and document those guidelines somewhere, and keep to them. If using it feels really painful, tweak the process! Git should be a useful tool. If it’s a source of frustration, there’s probably some friction in your workflow that could be resolved!
You work for a company that does autonomous piloting systems for aircraft. How’s working in that field affects your development process?
Coming from a SAAS background, it’s definitely a completely different way of working. When you’re dealing with safety-critical systems, you’re dealing with all sorts of regulations, requirements, auditing trails… it makes working agile a lot more challenging. You’re often dependent on things you can’t control.
While that’s one thing you deal with, you don’t have to deal with a whole host of other things I’m used to. Something very different from SAAS environments is that you’re not serving millions of users at once. You’re either working on embedded systems, machine learning, or tools for internal users. So, while we do have to take reliability into account, scaling is something that I never have to think about (although the data science team, of course, does face that challenge with the vast amounts of flight test data they handle).
Une conférence présentée par
 Pauline VOS |
Pauline is a freelance software engineer and consultant. She likes good, clean software design and being as efficient (lazy) as possible. Also cocktails, video games and animal memes. She lives in Amsterdam with her family and a bunch of plants. |