You suck at git - but it's honestly fine

Git is for everyone

I just started listening to localfirst.fm podcast podcast and would recommend it after 2 episodes. In the first episode, the hosts discuss where the term localfirst comes from, what it means, and examples of some localfirst, or semi-localfirst projects. One of them is git

• the de-facto standard by which developers share code today.

There's a reason it's the standard. I'm not arguing that it's perfect, and there's new abstractions that may help people adopt usage like jujutsu, but ultimately git is a great tool, and anyone can use it who works with text files (lookin at you book-writing nerds)

But as I was enjoying the pod the co-host/guest said "and we all know the git user experience isn't that great"

It's OK

Don't hear me say that you suck at git like that's a bad thing... It's totally fine to not be a wizard. Many people can use git like 80-90% efficiently for their own use cases. In fact, my usage of git doesn't fall into any perfectly established patterns, and the decisions I make are not always the same (the overplayed rebase vs merge-upstream argument... I do both, it doesn't matter, squash your crap at the end anyways...)

So continue to collaborate - checkout your feature branches, pull in origin/main after a PR, ask for help with a rebase for the 69th time if you need to

Seriously

Honestly, I learned about git 8 years ago when I started my first job as a data scientist. I was told by another developer, Jokko, that it was the standard for collaboration... only issue was that almost no one in our division even used it. Or if they did it was at the end of a project, after sharing code on share drives and OneDrive, at the very end we'd see git init, git add ., git commit -m "pushed to git", git push... literally 0 value, or at least no more value than my_project_final_FINAL_v2_project-over-now.zip

It took me a few weeks of on-the-job git usage, practicing way over complicated git flows and talking about git with the few people around me who knew it, for me to become a go-to resource... I was and am honestly still annoyed about it... It didn't take that long, or that much effort, to get pretty comfortable with git. There's tons of UIs (with their own flaws), TUIs, and resources for learning the few things that will make you stand out as a git wizard:

1. can you rebase onto a new root commit?
2. can you pull in changes from someone else's feature branch?
3. if you find yourself in detached HEAD state are you panicked?

Just make a directory, git init, and start shitting all over text files... make branches, reconcile differences, just freaking practice for 10 minutes

End

I was triggered I guess listening to this podcast episode... It's fine to not be an expert, it's fine to just use the 3 or 4 commands you probably need (git checkout -b, rebase origin/main, merge feature/branch, push), I am happy to help people with git everyday - like I said above, I am somehow a go-to resource for git in my workplace.... (heck, even one of my managers asks me to squash all the commits on his feature branches for him before it's merged to main... it's fine)

But the user experience isn't bad, so quit your bitching.