Git

When I first started using git I was at Amazon. It was maybe 2013 or 2014 when we started to move from Perforce to git.

At the time I really didn’t like it. It was hard to say why exactly, but it seemed very manual — almost to a fault.

The thing is that as time passed and I started to understand what exacly git was doing, how it’s doing it, and why, the easier things got. The thing that got in the way initially was how freaking flexible things are. You can do anything with git, but many (or even most) things it can do will do nothing but confuse you. It lets you do stupid things without you knowing it’s stupid. It has a fundamental lack of guardrails.

Now, I actually like it. I still tend to use various front-ends to do my job… be it one of the myriad of Jetbrains tools, or lazygit if I’m in the terminal. The thing that never really stuck for me was all of the command line options — especially the ones you only use once every couple of months.

I’m also working to get the rest of the team better up to speed with it — and trying to enforce some ways of working with it to prevent it from doing the stupid stuff unexpectedly.