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January 16, 2013

Filed under: tech»education

Git Busy

There's an ongoing discussion I'm having with the other instructors at Seattle Central Community College on how to improve our web development program. I come from a slightly different perspective than many of them, having worked in large organizations my whole career (most of them are freelancers). So there are places where we agree the program can do better (updating its HTML/CSS standards, reordering the PHP classes) and places where we differ (I'm strongly in favor of merging the design and development tracks). But there's one change that I increasingly think would make the biggest difference to any budding web developer: learning source control.

Source control management (SCM) is important in and of itself. I use it all the time for projects that I'm personally working on, so that I can track my own changes and work across a number of different machines. It's not impossible to be hired without SCM skills, but it is a mark against a potential employee, because no decent development team works without it. And using some kind of version control system is essential to participating in the modern open-source community, which is the number one way I advise students to get concrete experience for their resumes.

But more importantly, tools like Git and Subversion are gateways to the wider developer ecosystem. If you can clone a repo in Git, then you now have a tool for deployments, and you stop developing everything over FTP (local servers become much more convenient). Commits can be checked for validity before they go into the repo, so now you may be looking at automated code parsers and linting tools. All of these are probably going to lead you to other trendy utilities, like preprocessors and live reload. There's a whole world of people working on the web developer experience, creating workflows that didn't exist as recent as two or three years ago, and source control serves as a good introduction to it.

The objection I often hear is that instructors don't have time to keep up with everything across the entire web development field. Whether or not that's a valid complaint (and I feel strongly that it isn't), it's just not that hard to get started with version control these days. Git installs a small Bash shell with a repo-aware prompt. GitHub's client for Windows does not handle the advanced features, but it covers the 90% use case very well with a friendly UI. Tortoise has Windows add-ons for Git, SVN, and Mercurial. Learning to create a repo and commit files has never been easier--everything after that is gravy.

Last quarter, I recommended that teams coordinate their WordPress themes via GitHub, and gave a quick lecture on how to use it. The few teams that took me up on it considered it a good experience, and I had several others tell me they wish they'd used it (instead of manually versioning their work over DropBox). This quarter, I'm accepting homework via repo instead of portal sites, if students want--it'll make grading much easier, if nothing else. But these are stopgap, rearguard measures.

What SCCC needs, I think, is a class just on tooling, covering source control, preprocessing, and scripting. A class like this would serve as a stealth introduction to real-world developer workflows, from start (IDEs and test-driven development) to finish (deployment and build scripts). And it would be taught early enough (preferably concurrent with or right after HTML/CSS) that any of the programming courses could take it as a given. New developers would see a real boost in their value, and I honestly think that many experienced developers might also find it beneficial. Plus it'd be great training for me--I'm always looking for a good reason to dig deeper into my tools. Now I just have to convince the administration to give it a shot.

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