Steve Smith, software craftsman
A frequent question I hear from clients is some variant of “Ok, Continuous Integration is great, but how do we get everybody on the team to pay attention to it?” This is obviously a bigger problem if the question is coming from a lone junior developer, as opposed to a technical manager. In the case […]
There are a bunch of GitHub (and other git host) repositories that aren’t really for software projects, but rather are for documentation or other resources. For example, the ASP.NET Core docs, or various awesome lists, or the slides and materials from conferences like Stir Trek. Frequently, even as a non-developer, you may want to contribute […]
When working with GitHub on things like ReadMe.md files, it’s often helpful to include pictures. Unfortunately, when editing markdown files online, there’s no built-in capability to add images: Typically, this would mean you would need to create an image yourself and commit it into your repository somewhere so you could then reference it. It’s much […]
If you use GitHub a lot, as I do, you may appreciate this great Chrome extension, Octotree. Octotree is a free extension that adds a treeview navigation control to GitHub (and GitLab Enterprise, according to their docs) repositories, making it much easier to navigate around larger projects. You can see it in action here: I’ve […]
Here are two tips that teams I work with have found useful when working with git for larger projects with many team members that I thought I would share: Only merge into master if code is working The first tip is that you should only merge (or commit, but that should be rare) into master […]
I’m a big fan of GitHub and the workflow it provides. I find it to be very productive and collaborative, as well as lightweight. I work on quite a few different GitHub repositories, either for my own projects, for open source projects, or for clients. It’s especially helpful in any project with more than a […]
It’s a common housekeeping practice to delete git branches once they’re no longer used, but this practice isn’t necessarily universal, or universally understood. Why should you delete old branches from your git repositories? There are two main reasons: They’re unnecessary. In most cases, branches, especially branches that were related to a pull request that has […]
When you set up a new git repository, if you don’t properly configure a .gitignore file at the start, it can bite you later if you’ve already committed and pushed files that you really wished you’d kept out of the repo. If you’re working with GitHub, and you’re starting the repository from GitHub (rather than […]
If you’re using git and creating branches, then making pull requests, and ultimately merging them back into your main/master branch, you may end up with unused branches cluttering your repository. They don’t really hurt anything, but they can add some clutter and make it more difficult to find the branches that are actually in use. […]
I really like the workflow that GitHub Pull Requests allow. It’s great even in tiny projects to be able to get a code review for a given set of changes, and the UI for GitHub’s Pull Requests is better than any other source control system I’ve used (and doesn’t require buying an expensive tool or […]