Git and Collaboration

I've been using Git for a few years now, but most of the time I was working alone on small projects, what meant I only had to remember some basic commands and hardly ever had conflicts (just the few times I had to work on something with any of my colleagues).

Let alone PR. I had hear about them of course, specially when I started to look into resuming my career as a developer, but never had to create one before.

I can say that I learnt more about git and GitHub in this couple of weeks in the codeCollab program than in my previous years as a developer.

We use GitHub to create the issues that need to be working on, assigning and tagging them appropriately and to communicate between us about our problems and concerns (if any) with them.

Then, after working on the feature on a separate branch, we create a PR that has to be reviewed and approved at least by 3 people of the team (we are 4 plus the senior engineers, which means we all get to review someone else's work). Once it is approved it gets merged, and if there is any conflict we solve it.

To review an open PR, we pull the code to our local, ran it and test everything is working properly, flag any error or problems that arise and if none, approve it (and of course congratulate the person who did the job, it costs nothing to be nice and acknowledge the effort 😉)

It can all seem pretty simple, even for me as I'm writing this now after two weeks doing it, but the first time you face it it can be daunting! I also downloaded a Git GUI, but I prefer to don't use it much and type the commands on the CLI to learn it better and get more confident with it now that I can.

And on top of the tools, I think this second and third week at codeCollab has been very good on communication. We still need to keep improving, but I think the initial shyness is slowly vanishing and we are speaking more among us, doing more meetings, overcoming blockers together and moving forward quicklier as a team.

Collaboration, communication and team working skills are something that also need to be learnt and practised, besides coding, specially when working with remote teams in different timezones, something that looks like is in increasing demand nowadays. And I have the chance to learn, practise and improve them everyday. Thanks again Arit and Our Time for Tech for giving me the opportunity 🙏!

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash