Yes it may seem like when you switch over to a new revision system, git perhaps? That your brain may explode.  Or that things might turn into a major catastrophe.  Be that as it may I'm going to let you in on how I get things done at my job using git in my daily workflow.  This is by no means the best way to get things done, or the end all solution... so comments and suggestions are very welcome.

So at my current place of employment we have 4 developers coding out of the same code base.  It would seem like it would be easy enough to not step on eachother's toes, but it happens.  Sometimes it happens a lot!  Some of the main reasons:

• Whitespace in code
• Large files/classes/controllers (multiple people working out of the same file)
• Unique workflows
• Different programming environments
• Improper merges

I could go on for at least another minute or two, but you get the gist of it.  The whole point of a revision control system is to not only be able to version your code, but to also let it allow you to work succinctly with all of your team members.  So before I get into a typical day at the office, let's take a look at the structure of how our git repository is setup.

Repo Basics

I'm not going to go into how to setup a repository, how git is a DVCS, or how I like git better than SVN; but if you'd like I can do that in another post.  We're going to nail down the basics of how our repo should function and some general terminology.

First off we have a generic repository for each project.  We then use that generic repository to share code between ourselves and the deployment system.  Each developer then forks that main repository and creates their own repository of the codebase as well.  For instance our main repo might be developers/projectName@github, and my personal repository would be aronstaves/projectName@github.  The great thing about github is they provide a few not-so-common features with their repository and also have the ability to setup private and public repositories.

For the most part, each developer in our team has access to 3 repositories.

1. Local - this is each developer's git repository that's located locally on their development machine.  This is what we develop in day to day.
2. Origin (aaron/projectName@github) - this refers to the personal developer repository that lives remotely (on github).  This is used for personal backups of branches, or for pushing branches remotely that that other developers do not need access to.
3. Upstream (developers/projectName@github) - this refers to the generic repository that everyone forked their developer repositories from.  Pushing branches to this repository allows you to share code with other developers as well as the deployment system.  If the branch isn't in upstream, it isn't a candidate for deployment.

So in short, I develop out of my local branch every day.  If I have a branch I want to save for later, or possibly an incomplete feature I want to delete locally and pull down later, I'll push it to origin.  This way I'm not cluttering up upstream with various branches that other developers know absolutely nothing about, and that they probably don't care about!  If I need to share code with other developers, or give the deployment system acess to code, I'll push it to upstream.

Branch Basics

Alright! Now that you see how the repos work, let's check out how branches work within a repository.  At any given time, I'll have a minimum of 3 branches available.   Master and Release typically are tracked against the upstream repository, and the development branch is pushed wherever it is needed.  Again, these aren't rules to follow, but how I personally use git.

Master Branch

Stable Tested code.  I cannot stress that enough, only stable and production tested code should be put into master.  Once we've had a successful deployment of release code, we will production test it.  Once tested, release code is merged into master and tagged.  This branch is mainly used for breakfixes or rolling back deployment.

Release Branch

This is all code that is staged for release, but not yet tested in a production environment.  Just to reiterate, if your code is not going to get released, it has no business being in this branch.  Once code from a development branch has been tested by a developer, it is merged into this branch and put through QA testing.

I also want to stress working out of this branch is typically a big no-no.  Not only could this lead to unwanted code getting committed to the next release, but it also has the potential to spread commits for a specific feature across non-linear commits.  I'll get into the problems this can cause later, but unless you're making a single commit change to the soon-to-be released, you should make a branch for your code change.

Development

This is code that is currently being developed and is typically branched from release.  So when you want to start a new feature, you'll checkout release (and make sure you have the latest code pulled down!), then create a development branch from that.  I'll also go over a typical development lifecycle later as well.

Anyways, that's a quick high level overview of how I typically get things done in git.  Look out in the next week or two on how I branch, rebase and merge in code with other devs on my team.

At any rate, this is just a quick update to hopefully kick myself into gear for getting some stuff done.  Some things that will be coming up:

A new project!

Not like I really actually finish any of my projects but I can dream right?  So far things have gotten off to a better start than most.  I've started using codeigniter, which is a pretty lightweight MVC framework.   Toss in a little ORM magic on there and I'm set!  Right now I've got just a login page, some sessions and some inheritance vodoo going on.  All things considered it's further than I've gotten most times.  I'll be sure to post more updates as they come.
 

Revision control!

At work we've been using git for the past few months and I'm becoming a huge git enthusiast.  Problem is, there's a ton of ways to do things!  So in the next few weeks I'll hopefully have a few posts on how *I* personally use git as well as how it could potentially be used in smaller to mid-size development teams.  This topic might have to be broken out into a few multiple ones.

So there you have it.  In the spirit of keeping me honest, please hound me to get at least one blog post a week.  Sunday nights seem like as good a time as any.  You know, until football season starts.

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Awesome 90's cartoons aside, there are things that we can learn from the user! The past few weeks I've been re-desiging a lot of the web user interfaces here at work. I've found that when I'm given a chance to update an already designed UI, I can pretty much copy the old style and just give it a "web 2.0" boost and add in some new functionality - no biggie. But when given a completely new projectthat is done from scratch, I start to get a bit lost.

The reason I bring this up is because last sprint I was given a chance to make a new web tool for some of our in-house support staff to use. This tool replaces some minor SQL query's that I would do on a day to day basis, so I was already pretty familiar with the project. Initially I threw together what I thought to be an all-in-one awesome bone-crushing tool that did everything it had to... and more! However! Upon dropping this tool on our support staff, it became readily apparent that they were not terribly familiar with all aspects of this particular system, and had no idea how to use my brand new shiny tool. Oops! Looks like my user interface doesn't fit the job!

In all fairness it is completely my fault, because I was trying to make a tool that I would use, and not a tool that your average Joe User would use. So after going over my UI with some of the people that were actually using it, I got some input and tried to see if I could possibly improve upon my abomination of a webpage. Now here's where I get into my UI design. I assume everyone has pretty much heard all of these before, but this seemed to really hit home for me this past week - so I'm putting them up anyways!

Simplicity! You'll hear this time and time again about making things easier for the user. And most of the time, they're probably going to be right. My first iteration had a real classy whiz-bang multiple selection drag and drop interface, when this clearly was not even needed in the end-user interface. It was just going to be a new thing to learn, and a new widget full of potential bugs. So that got scrapped and replaced with a table layout using divs. This way the user can just focus on one element at a time, and it makes handling the data immensely easier on the programming side.

Dialogs are also an amazingly easy way to make things simpler. Everyone has seen them, everyone knows how to use them and it's no surprise when one pops up. Using dialogs completely changes how a page can be viewed. Instead of displaying all information all the time, just display a lot of very specific information when a user requests it. This not only makes your layout a lot cleaner, but also allows you to separate functionality from various sections of the page.

Consistency! Granted, with a lot of the new javascript libraries such as dojo an YUI, there are lots of awesome widgets at your disposal. The problem is - is that if the user doesn't know how they're supposed to work, how is that actually helping them? This was pretty apparent with my drag and drop widget that I mentioned above, but simple things like common layouts as well as how the data is presented also have a huge impact on how well the UI is received. So in keeping with the above comment, simple and consistent seemed to be the way to go.

Quick and Verbose! So obviously with the newly (re)discovered XMLHttpRequest techniques, this gives an opportunity to make people not have to navigate from page to page - like it was 1995. Using XHR's to speed up saving or loading data in the background makes pages appear to be loading faster as well as makes the user happy. Win-Win! The only problem is - is that you still need to let the user know what's going on. In most cases a simple throbber will do. So along with the verboseness, some helpful messages are always nice as well. If creating a pdf is going to take a few minutes on the server, maybe you should let the user know that. This way, hopefully, they'll think twice before actually calling in and complaining about how your site is slow.

So all in all, I cranked out my re-designed tool over the weekend and Monday morning it was getting put to use. Everyone that's using it seems to be a lot happier and more comfortable with the tool, which makes me a lot happier because now I no longer have to be diving through SQL to make minor changes. Obviously no UI is going to satisfy everyone, but following the above will at least get me started on the right track from now on. I also find myself drawing about 10 to 15 drafts of what I think the wire-frame should look like before I even start coding. This is a pretty big step from where I was 2 years ago and so far it seems to be working well.

I apologize for the lazyness in posting, but I have been somewhat busy between work, side projects and other things. So hopefully I can get back into the habit of posting.