Git Source Control: for the Rest of Us

Speaker:  Nolan Erck
July 9, 2014

What about those designers/JS/CSS folks that WEREN'T using Subversion, and don't CARE about how under the hood Git uses a different type of pointer file storage thing, blah blah blah? There's a whole new wave of developers/designers that could stand to have an intro to Git that matches their workflow more concisely.

Objective of the topic

So far all the "Intro to Git" presentations I've seen have covered the same points, and all assumed the user does source control management via the command line. For a lot of people, that's simply not the case. For example, front-end developers that came from a Photoshop background and are now doing more HTML/CSS work. Let's get these people up to speed on how to use source control in way that makes sense to them!

Target Audience

People that want to learn a) what source control is, and when/why I should use it, b) people that don't drop down to a command-line interface for such tasks, c) everyone that's been snickered at when asking how to use a GUI tool to start learning Git, instead of those strange command-line instructions.

Assumed Knowledge

A familiarity with asset files and the idea that "I need to make backups of these and share them with my team in an organized way". For this presentation, I'm making no assumptions about any prior knowledge or use of a source control system.

Main Points

• An intro to what "source control" is and when / why I need it.
• An intro to what Git is.
• How to use Git from a GUI.
• The difference in Git and GitHub.
• Some next steps -- branching, reverting, merging, using some real code/asset files instead of "those colored dots" we've all seen too many times in Git presos already. ;)

Presentation Links

• Presentation Recording

Nolan Erck

Nolan Erck has been developing software professionally for more than 15 years, starting in the video game industry as a Tools Programmer, and advancing to web development in 1999. He has worked on high profile projects for LucasArts, Maxis, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, Schools Credit Union, and Alive N Kicking Magazine among others. His list of credits includes Grim Fandango, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, SimPark, and SimSafari, as well as high-traffic websites for a variety of technology based companies.

Nolan has been consulting full time since 2007, working on web and mobile projects, as well as teaching classes on many facets of software development. Nolan ran the Sacramento ColdFusion User Group for 4 years and now runs SacInteractive, an "all things web and mobile development" group. He is an active member of the Web Developer community, giving presentations on Object-Oriented Programming and Web Development across the country.

When he's not consulting or talking about himself in the third person, Nolan can usually be found working on one of several music projects.