.: jus' fyrfli tings :.

collaborative coding ... how did we not fuck it up?

at the risk of dating myself ... i am comparing how we code collaboratively now vs how i did it when i first started working as a programmer in the 80s.... and i am astounded that we did not fuck it up worse than we did because ... reckless is the word for those days.

spoiler alert: tech-speak ahead ... sorry

my first job was in a small business back in jamaica ... the first day, my manager handed me an 8inch diskette and pointed me towards an ibm system36 and said "that's your baby now". it was a payroll program written for st. mary banana (the name of the company is now jamaica prodocers group; i have been away sooooo very long now) in COBOL... (yes; i am that old.) ... i wasn't only in charge of the code, i was also in charge of running their payroll for them. (once, my manager had to rush-drive me to st. mary parish to hand the payroll over by hand because of some issue i cannot remember now.)

i was the only one working on that program ... on that machine. so version control was basically keeping track of what changes i made in case i needed to roll them back... or writing functions that could be included in main program code... easier to remove if it's buggy. version control was ... bascially nonexistent.

for at least a decade afterwards, any coding i did was either done in this manner, or in a "dev environment" where everybody was working at the same time... QA was done in a QA environment and then the changes copied to production once all tests are passed.

now that i am thinking about it ... that was quite reckless... and i don't even know how we managed to not fuck it up more often. i honestly don't remember any fatal mistakes (other than that one time a non-tech manager logged into the root account (the account that is basically GOD on a *nix machine) on a machine and did a cd /; rm -rf * ... i don't think she ever lived that down... thank god for backups.)

ℹ️ in *nix systems (*nix - short form including both linux and unix), rm -rf ./* removes every single file from that directory on down ... as recursively ... without warning ... cd /; changes your current working directory to the top level directory ... think C:\ in windows.

today ... i made a change, pushed to a remote repo, and created a pull request. now, it's been a while since i have written code for anyone other than myself. a long while. and sure i use git a lot ... but i am the only one working on those repositories. fuckups are mine and mine alone. and i have to say that git makes fuckups a LOT LESS stressful.

i kinda wish we'd had this back when i was coding for the first time ever.

can i just interject to say how much i love this new theme?