Life Beyond Fife

If this isn't the only site you've looked at for assistance learning git, you may have come across advice that perhaps contradicts some of the suggestions I've made.

This guide does not claim, not wants to be, an exhaustive guide to git.

While actively writing code and experimenting with possible solutions, it's crucial to be constantly committing code to your local git repo.

The middle cycle helps reduce the complexity of your final commit.

The outer most cycle represents a full development task loop beginning with getting the latest code from the origin repo; developing, say, a new product feature or bug fix; and ending with creating a pull request for your changes so that they're available…

When beginning to collaborate on a coding project using git, there are a couple of steps to create a local copy of the repo.

There are three development activities that cycle repeatedly within each other.

Every repo, after an initial commit, starts by default with one branch and that is named master.

Once your changes have been carefully reviewed and staged, they're ready to be committed to the active branch.

Once you have staged all the changes you want to make (see add, remove and reset), you're ready to commit those changes to the active branch.

Git is a stickler for detail, but helpfully so.

Welcome to one of the most easily confused git commands there is: checkout.

The state of a codebase on a git server, whether an origin repo in a server or on someone's laptop, is represented by one or more branches.

Hopefully you, and the powers that be at your company, are convinced: git is the future and the way forward.

No matter how agile we get, or small and isolated we try to make our changes, collaborative development will always leave us stepping on each other's toes.

Have you ever experimented with a few different approaches to solving a tricky problem only later to try to salvage an earlier working state with a mixture of +Z bashing and consulting the last known state in the VCS server?

Some server-client Version Control Systems (VCSs), for instance Perforce, have concepts like shelving where you can isolate changes you make for a bug fix from concurrent changes for a new product feature.

The previous generation of Version Control Systems (VCS), like Subversion, have a traditional client-server model.

Whether you're yet to use the world's favourite new version control system in earnest or not, be under no illusions - it is the future, git has won.

It's hopefully old news to you all but the free lunch is over (NB this article is 10 years old).

The web is awash with introductions and guides to using git.

It's that time of year again to update the data in my English Premier League, Fantasy Football Team Selector spreadsheet.

XML and JSON are the two most common generic standards for passing representation state information in web APIs.

How should you begin to learn programming?

Individuals within the software development community are in one of two states.

Understanding how computers work is essential in allowing us to use them as tools.

I'm a strong believer in learning by doing.

We’ve now established that knowing the base of a number system is crucial to counting, and that computers exclusively use the binary number system i.e. base-two.

The journey of learning about Computer Science will start by revisiting a simple lesson first encountered by most as a toddler: how to count.

Earlier this year I helped out a random Hacker News commenter.

Computer science is a subject dear to my heart and I feel constantly aggrieved by how misunderstood and misreported the discipline is by the media, programmers and everyone inbetween (see my complaint with University Challenge).

It's that time of year again.

Education is changing in a big way.

"My Name is Karl, Ich Bin Expert" I don't quote Karl Hungus lightly.

"Where is that drip coming from?"

So often when faced with a programming task, you never truly solve the required problem from scratch.

Recently at work I was confronted by a problem requiring data persistance outside of a database - in this case, a saved parameter project file.

Perhaps the one constant in becoming an expert in any particular craft is to do it regularly - preferably daily.

As a non-statistician who every now and then has to understand statistical concepts as if they were second nature, illustrative examples are like gold dust to me.

What's New?

At the beginning of the year I posed a conundrum on Twitter.

"[Stanford's] students come out, and they believe that C and C++ are the fabric with which God wove the Universe.

I have failed.

Happy Anniversary!

UPDATED VERSION: Fantasy Football Team Selector 2013-14 It's that exciting time of year again.

Imagine a completely modularised approach to designing user interfaces.

The greatest advert for being a software developer today is the low – practically non-existent – barrier to entry.

For as long as I can remember I've been programming and I never seriously thought about doing anything else for a living.

Welcome back guys!

Just so you know, I am still alive... ...but the sabbatical finally had to come to an end.