How Git Changed My Life
Starting out on my web development journey, I began at the very beginning. The web development program at Salt Lake Community College did a great job of teaching me the fundamentals of web development but it was a tad outdated. Although its hard to blame SLCC because this field moves fast I was learning technologies like JQuery and manually uploading the files to a hosting service that I had paid for. While this taught me how things are done at the basic level, the work flow of using plain old notepad++ and manually uploading everything was extremely tedious and took a decent amount of the project time. When I started at UVU and really took advantage of VSCode and it’s functionality with Git, web development became much more enjoyable for me.
When I started using VSCode paired with Github, web development became much more enjoyable and less tedious for me. Before when I made a mistake on the site or had to fix a bug, I would have to SSH into the web server all over again entering my username, password etc. just to upload a single file. This made learning code and messing around with it much more annoying because when learning back-end technologies like PHP, it was important to test everything on the live server because of all the complications of hosting it on your local machine. Now when I develop everything is updated and synced with my repository on Github with the push of a button. What before took multiple applications and browser windows to accomplish, now takes one click within the development software im already using.
Github offers an easy way for you to track your code and make sure the project you’re working on your local machine is linked with the live version on the web server. Github also offers hosting of webpages integrated into the site already so it made developing and turning in assignments to be viewed by professors much easier and faster. Now when I make a new web app I write it and update it within VSCode, click once to push the code to my repository and click one more time to have my code hosted on a live server to be viewed by others. Much better!
Conclusion
It’s no surprise that GitHub is an integral part of any web project today. Version tracking and ease of use make it the #1 choice for developers in the field especially when working in teams. Learning the tedious way, then learning GitHub after taught me how valuable something like this is and why it’s important to become proficient in it. For as long as I develop web apps I will always be making use of version tracking software like GitHub.
Sterling Holt is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web & App Development. The following article relates to (Final Project) in the (DGM 2120 Course) and representative of the skills learned.
