How I learned Git

About me

I'm a final year undergrad at IIT Roorkee in Computer Science. I'm an open source enthusiast and love to mentor and guide students.

Why I wanted to learn Git

Git and version control is an important part of software development. It makes the process of managing code more lucrative and is a necessary tool in the software development industry.

How I approached learning Git

I started out with basic lectures on git and version control. It was followed by contributing to a few open source projects on github. A few organizations have a very open culture to include new collaborators into development. To name a few, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Zulip are some organizations that can be used to start off learning not just their codebase, but also version control practises.

Challenges I faced

As you get into version control, the complexity of problems keeps on increasing. After getting over basic commands like add, commit, push comes commands like rebase, onto rebase and fixing merge conflicts.
As much as it is necessary to learn these commands and read about them, to deepdive into version control, practice is the best approach.

Key takeaways

Key takeaways would be that although version control can get a little confusing in the beginning, as you deepdive into it, it is actually a very interesting technology. And its benifits are immense in any maintaining any codebase.

Tips and advice

Start off slow. Read a lot of theory from online resources but at the same time, make sure you are implementing it on some codebases to make sure you implement what you have learned.

Final thoughts and next steps

Next step to version control can be learning other version control technologies, like Mercurial.