La parole est aux speakers : Pauline Vos

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La conférence

For you, what’s the most underrated feature in Git?

Probably reflog. So many people are terrified of making Git mistakes (i.e. while performing a rebase or resolving a merge conflict), not realizing that you can undo literally any mistake you make with reflog! It’s not the most intuitive, but it works very well. I’m working on something that will help people fix mistakes using reflog in more human language. Hopefully that will make people feel more comfortable to make mistakes in Git.

You’ve run Git workshops for groups of 100 people and for small teams. What’s the biggest challenge when you’re training such a large crowd?

One thing that can be challenging is that you can’t help people out at their screens when they are having trouble figuring something out. Luckily, this usually organically resolves themselves because other participants around them who have figured it out will help them. Another thing that’s difficult is to gauge if participants can keep up or if I should slow down. I don’t want people to lose track and start zoning out!

Apparenty you’re well-known by Brazillian devs for the gambiarra tweet. Could you tell us about that?

This thing keeps following me! I’ve had a fair few Brazillian colleagues and they all call dirty code hacks « gambiarras ». A gambiarra is a uniquely Brazilian term that means something like a bad McGuyver hack; solving a problem practically with whatever is at hand. An unwritten rule is that a gambiarra will often solve a specific problem but cause ten others. I highly recommend searching Google images for some gambiarra hilarity.
Anyway, after I saw yet another comment in our code base along the lines of « this is a gambiarra », I decided to Tweet this. I thought it may get a like or five from Brazilian friends, but it ended up going viral in Brazil. Friends were DMing me saying their mother had posted it in the family group chat. I was approached by Brazilian press. And more than half of my Twitter following is now Brazilian.

Une conférence présentée par

Pauline VOS

Pauline is a lead back-end engineer (and fledgling front-end engineer) known for her Git prowess. She loves to show off advanced Git tricks at conferences (and other topics from time to time). Outside of tech life she's June's mom and resides in Amsterdam with her family.

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