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?