Development as a team is an important part of every bigger IT project. Version control are essential for this even if they bing some pitfalls you may want to avoid. On June 14th we were joined by Florian Sattler, a PhD student, for his talk “Git - Advanced usage and details”, where he showed some tricks for efficiently working with the version control system git. He presented some basics as well as more advanced handling and went into dos and don’ts when working with git. Humorous bits about the “daily madness” helped him to develop and show a kind of handbook for tricky situations. For example, git reflog helps getting back lost commits, and for “but-it-worked-last-time”-situations git bisect can be a helpful tool. git blame finds the author of every bit of code (whereas blame in real life is not always the best for team building) and branches and git worktree are important features for all who want to mulit-task. Florian also went into detail about git rebase, but he warned the audience that changing pushed code is asking for problems by comparing it to time travel literature, both can have devastating effects on the present (code versions).

The whole talks was an entertaining introduction into some advanced git tools and techniques. In addition, the slides for the talk (to obtain, please contact pr-taskforce@ieee.uni-passau.de) could save you in your next git emergency.