Introduction to Version Control

Lightning talk on version control from Rails Girls London.

Transcript

1. Introduction to version control
2. Managing changes
3. • Wikipedia page history • google docs revision log • track changes in Word
5. How does a good VCS help?
6. Saving our bacon • Store your code securely • Throw away a change that doesn’t work • Find an older version that works • Find what change caused a problem
7. Working with others • Allow people to work together without conflict • Avoid fragmentation of the codebase • Track who changed what, when, why
8. Experimenting in isolation • You don’t want to release a half done or experimental feature • Create a copy of your codebase: a branch • When that feature is done, you merge that branch
9. Top tips
10. Lingo • You store code in a repository • You checkout code from a repository • You commit changes back to the repository • When you commit a change you write a commit message explaining your changes
11. Keep commits small and focussed • Fix 1 bug • Add 1 feature • Not all the work from 1 day
12. Commit messages are letters to your future self • Explain what you are doing, and why you are doing • 1 line summary, plus longer discussion if needed
13. A bad commit message • Doesn’t tell you why you made the change. • Doesn’t describe what the change was • Won’t make much sense 6 months from now Twiddle some CSS
14. A better commit message Fixed homepage rendering bug on firefox 16 Firefox incorrectly calculates padding when nesting a something element in a something else element.
15. There are many revision control systems • git, mercurial, bazaar, svn, darcs, perforce etc. • git is the most popular in the rails community
16. Where to go from here • Install git! • Free git hosting at github.com • The git book - http://git-scm.com/book • GUIs: Tower, github for mac/windows
17. Version control is for everyone!