CJ Eller

I've gone off-roading with git at work. On production. It's a pretzel of merge requests and commits that I have to untangle to get to something that resembles a reliable source of truth. Thankfully no production resources broke because of the changes — only my ego.

I thought I knew more about Git not to get (ha) into this pretzel. But here's the thing — I thought a rudimentary knowledge of git commands would get me by. It doesn't. The problem is my lack of knowledge of using version control within context —when there's more than one person working on more than one branch. That blindspot is now apparent.

Look, knowing how to say certain words doesn't mean you know how to hold a conversation. More than a series of commands, I am learning that git is actually the conversational space for people who run a codebase. It's great if you know how to check in a branch and push changes, but there's more going on behind the scenes. Do you create branches for each feature? How do merge requests get taken care of? These were things that flew over my head and landed me in the spot where I am on — untangling a pretzel because I didn't fully know what the standards for doing version control were.

But moments of learning can come from moments of failure. Blogging about this gives me perspective. Now I just need to act on that.