GIT — Are we the Monkeys in the Monkey-Banana-Water Gun Experiment?

A note to all those monkeys following the lead — What was revolutionary about GIT that other version controls missed

TL;DR; Collaborate without leaving your $home

Lets face it Git when compared to other version control systems like Perforce/Subversion has far more concept counts and is not so intuitive with it’s usage. So why is it the norm?

Are we just doing this git thingy to be cool?

Hence, becoming a living example of the monkey-banana-water-spay experiment [you can read the story here]?

Whats the big deal you ask ?

We pay a git ramp up price every time a new engineer joins.

We found that familiarity with branching in git was relatively low & it was essential to why we were using git ☺

So Tell me Why?

Lets consider this
A junior developer let’s call him Sam is lost in his changes so sends out a cry for help — the helping engineer in you asks about the problem. You are like ok that’s strange I need to look at what you are doing — Sounds familiar?

Enter’s GIT in shining armor
Getting Sams changes to try? Well he could send a diff or you could walk up to his box and work there[I will not get into the obsession with .files ☺] — but imagine this you simply type

$git checkout sam-working

And all your local files are now that of Sams — isn't that freaking awesome — No more having multiple branches — git checkout becomes your buddy.

Let’s take this further — you could debug Sams code on your box and make changes to it and then to share it with Sam simply

$ git commit

Viola only Sam gets your changes. No merging, reverting, multiple branches or sharing/applying diffs.

PS: This is not a git vs others post — that battle is already won ☺. But rather as a note to all those monkeys following the lead on why git won over others.