Git Workshop Retrospective

I was elated with how well the workshop was received. All 22 open spots were taken on meetup.com and we had 100% of those people show up! There were still around 12 people on the waiting list. Five women participated (including me), making the gender balance 23% female…not too shabby! Everyone was snug in our small space at Blazing Cloud, but it worked.

I think that the hands on approach was very effective. First I had everyone pair off and work together to research one of the following:

  1. when to use cherry-pick
  2. when to use checkout (branch & files)
  3. when to use merge
  4. when to use reset
  5. when to use revert
  6. when to use rebase
  7. when to use branch vs stash
  8. how to ignore files
  9. find as many ways to add & commit as you can (all the options & flags, what they do)
  10. how to delete files properly

Then each pair reported back with their findings. The discussion was great, made even better when Brian Colfer, my co-organizer & git expert came by and explained complex git concepts articulately.

We switched gears and each pair completed an exercise I prepared. All the materials for the exercise are online at gitworkshop.com. The scenario included a boss who barked out indecisive orders that gave us opportunities to git reset, git revert, git stash, git cherry-pick, git merge and git branch. I learned a ton creating the tutorial (spent at least 12 hours doing it…plenty of time to get a good grasp of git).

My impression was that the participants learned a lot and had a good time!

Posted by Liah on Wednesday, February 24, 2010