Life usually leads people down unexpected paths. That’s the only explanation I can give myself for holding a short Git workshop during my vacation in Australia. The friend I’m staying with works in a company that plans to change its source versioning to Git. It came up during a casual conversation and I mentioned that it’s a way to go because we did that a year ago in Five Minutes and never looked back; I had done a few internal workshops to help the transition.
It quickly got to one of the managers who liked the idea of a workshop and one was arranged for a few days later. It was a great way for me to show appreciation for the hospitality, but also to meet new people and see how they work.
Syple Technologies is a small software company and it recently moved into new offices in Sydney center. The atmosphere is really great and offices beautiful. I really liked the setting and especially the kanban glass boards.
Fourteen people interested in Git attended the workshop. It was almost two hours long and I could tell it was a lot of new stuff for everyone, but questions I was asked told me they were getting the hang of it. The workshop covered differences between central and distributed systems, how Git works under the hood (the general architecture) and a few of the standard workflows. A half of it was hands-on; I demonstrated how easy it is to branch and merge, and that it’s OK to look and explore inside .git.
It finished on a very positive note. I hope everyone managed to get the gist of Git and that they’ll give it a try. It was a great experience for me, especially for giving it in English for the first time.
Damir Cuca, one of the co-founders, wrote a very positive review about the workshop a few days later:
We had the pleasure of having Merlin present to our organisation the ins and outs of Git version control. He is an expert in the field and was able to distil the technology in an easy to understand manner. He also assisted us in designing a workflow process that would enable us to use Git within an agile development environment. This has provided us with immediate results helping us to streamline our development and deployment process (saving us time and money!).
He is truly a skilful magician! His skills extend beyond Git and is an incredibly valuable individual that any organisation would be grateful to have in their arsenal.