Source Control

8th Light Apprenticeship - Day 30

category: apprenticeship

Back to client site today. On arrival, I felt slightly apprehensive, wondering how much progress had been made since we left them to their own devices on Monday. My fear was that every pair would be blocked for different reasons, however attitudes still seemed positive, and people seemed to be occupied.

Each pair had their own piece of the system underway, none of it under source control. The first thing we did was introduce them to git. It took the whole morning to get everyone to clone, create a branch, update the readme and push to create a pull request. Cue a number of merge conflicts. The group got plenty of practise updating master and re-raising their pull request.

I’m pleased to report that during the afternoon there was a quite a few new pull requests flying around with their work in. None of it integrated together, but at least its now safely residing in one repository.

It’s beginning to be clear which of the graduates work well in pairs and which need to try different approaches. Initially the team wanted to rotate pairs once a week, but we hope that after our gentle coaxing they will consider rotating more frequently, in order to spread knowledge and increase the experience of working with different colleagues.

We definitely added value today by teaching the basics of git, but there is a long way to go. The group lacks experience so they are not able to foresee problems such as having their unit tests depend on a database, not having continuous integration, not integrating the different parts of the system early. As time goes on, and with our helpful hints, we hope they will be able to draw to these conclusions.