One of our Coding & Cocktails LadyDevs, Tara, will be sharing her perspective on the Coding & Cocktails sessions with us over the next few months.  Here is what she had to say about the March session on version control.

Version control. It’s an easy enough concept to understand: a system of recording changes to a file so that specific changes can be recalled later.  There are several reasons this is important in development, and we used Git to learn how to create our own repositories and pull/push them between our laptops and the cloud. So, let’s Git on with it!

The command line made it’s comeback this month as we worked in Git Bash again. We pulled repositories down from GitHub onto our local machines, made updates,and pushed them back up to the GitHub. It’s surprisingly not as difficult as it sounds. Some of the more complicated concepts are forking and branching. Forking is when you copy someone’s repository to your own project, while branching sometimes involves working on a project with others, being able to make your changes separately from the released version of code and merging it back into the master branch.

Here I owe a big shout out to our mentors! I got lost several times along the way, and our mentors are always right there to help out. This was a quick paced Coding & Cocktails and went right until 9pm, so it was great to have the mentors right there when something didn’t work quite right. Coding & Cocktails makes sure you aren’t ever lost, and I’m very grateful for the work these ladies do to keep us learning!

The big take away I got from this session is the implications to modular development, where teams work on individual aspects of a project and merge it into a solid whole later, and peer review elements. GitHub is very important in both of these regards. Also, if the code doesn’t work for some reason and a prior version is needed, version control makes it easy to go back to the necessary version. All of these are important elements of development. This session gave a big overview of what life in the workplace will be like after graduation, so that’s greatly appreciated.