LabKitty Recommends is a recurring feature wherein I recommend something.
Linus Torvalds is the George Lucas of computing: He had one good idea a long time ago, and now nobody dare raise a hand to his awful ones. Case in point: git and its daemon spawn GitHub. In a righteous world, they would have done to Torvalds' career what "Rock me Tonight" did to Billy Squire's. Instead, nerds wet their knickers just typing the names, all-the-while pretending that perfectly good SVC solutions didn't exist long before git's fresh hell was loosed upon the world. Apparently we'll suffer any sling and arrow for a chance to sit at the cool kids' table. Software development is just high school with different bullies.
Infamous for horribleness, git is also the rare topic for which Internet help is useless. The contraption's forced popularity has ironically killed Google as a resource. Any git-related search will return a virtual mountain of answers. Half of these will be clickbait. Half of the other half will be from people only interested in demonstrating how much smarter they are than you. Half of the third half will be wrong, and at least one of the answers is guaranteed to destroy your work.
Sure, somewhere buried in this Zeno partition may be what you need. But if you could finger the correct answer, you wouldn't need help in the first place.
What to do?
Alas, I can't point you at a specific reference to solve your problem. My only certainty is that a solution will not come from the StackExchange crowd. As Archimedes said of the arch and Mr. Miyagi said of karate, git cannot be approached piecemeal. It's best served by something that begins on page one with turn back now and if you can power through to the index you will have acquired what you require.
I'm referring to books. Specifically, books on git. We have come full circle, returning to quaint days when knowledge was impressed unto pulp planes and bound into tomes for flippy review. Yes, something held to standards of punctuation and grammar and for which you pay money to hold. Accept this, or accept a tempest of obfuscation having no known perimeter, whose motivation never extends beyond virtual high-fives and whose claims are proofed not by veracity but by fiat. Enkuklopaideia of the damned.
Which book? you ask (cf. post title). Therein trouble lurks.
Print divisions are not quite as fractious as the Internet. Still, each author has a style, focus, and intended audience. What sort of reader are you? A question no analytic can answer, save for browser and country-of-origin (and, my paws, folks in the former Soviet Union really love them some IE).
My face isn't your face, as the Canadian Rafael "Ted" Cruz was once understood to say. Perhaps you are a Czechenkian polymath seeking to emigrate from your bitter homeland. Perhaps you are an inner-city youth looking for a way past the SAT and into an Ivy. Or perhaps you are an experienced software engineer forced into git at the end of some teenage CEO's bayonet.
My advice is to find one book that speaks to you. Make yourself its master and it yours.
One book. Homo unius libri. A grail into which you pour the belief of a Medieval pope that your Chosen One is correct in all things. You must not waiver, you must not doubt. Like that TOS episode on the planet of the KO Corral, where Spock mind gronked everybody's apprehension that the bullets were real.
Because make no mistake: Your faith will be tested. The whole raison d'être of git is horde coding. And as the saying goes, none of us is as stupid as all of us. Play the game long enough and events will conspire to color outside the lines of your git comfort zone. You might never enrage the beast, but somebody will.
Here comes dick, he's wearing a skirt. He also swallowed the hype that automerge works (it doesn't). Here comes jane, you know she's sportin' a chain. And she beat your PR by two minutes so you need to stash your changes, rewind to HEAD~, and merge her code into your upstream (or something).
This is when Jesus phases back to the TikiHut to snag more brewtowskis and your metaphorical beach contains only one pair of footprints. Now the only person who can save you is you. The last thing you need is a shrieking Internet peanut gallery. You need confidence. Poise. Clarity in the righteousness of your cause and the right course of action that will cause it.
At such a crossroads, to half-know git is worse than not knowing git at all.
So today in LabKitty Recommends, I offer the Zen-like recommendation of no recommendation. You must find a book that explains Torvald's abomination in your brand of brain-speak and wrap yourself in it like armor. Your very own Secret Fire of Anor. Trust in your guide as Hightower and Deliverer with a single mindedness that makes Daniel Jackson's trust in Unertl seem picayune. Then give yourself over to git. Pick out a track suit and drink the kool-aid. Because struggling will only make it hurt more, believe me. There is no escaping this Norwegian cult.
And should a Gospel morning arrive when you choose to share any hard-won expertise with the rest of us, remember a Golden Rule the Internet will someday embrace if I have a say in the matter: Any response that includes the term "cherry-pick," "JSQuerry," or "wavelet" is you being a dick. Don't be a dick.
Begin searching for your git sherpa on Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment