Tag Archives: Version Control

Demystifying Git and Merge Conflicts 

Git can be an incredibly effective coding tool, but it can also be an incredibly frustrating one. It has a steep learning curve, but you’ll be a lot better off understanding how it works rather than copying and pasting commands from Stack Overflow or ChatGPT. I’ve been there, and things can go very, very wrong.

What is Git?

Git is a version control system which tracks changes in files within a repository. It lets you maintain different versions of that codebase. Not to be confused with GitHub, which is a Git server, or a remote location which serves as the host to codebases in Git. GitHub provides a user-friendly front-end for managing changes and issue tracking. There are plenty of other Git servers, such as Bitbucket and GitLab.

Tips for using Git

Git is massive, and there’s plenty of tutorials and guides out there to help you learn it. This is far from a comprehensive guide, but these are the commands I use on a regular basis. I’ll go over some of the basics, and then some of the niche ones that I’ve found particularly useful. 

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Do not forget to add your data folder to .gitignore

It is good practice not to commit a data folder to version control if the data is available elsewhere and you do not want to track changes of the data. But do not forget to also add an entry for this folder to .gitignore because otherwise git iterates over all the files in the folder when checking for file changes, which may take a long time if there are many files.

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