Owen Stephens is a consulting librarian working in the UK, helping libraries, and their members, exploit computers and information technology. Currently Owen is working on projects related to online Historical Texts, online Journal Archives, helping institutions monitor open access publications and track online resources.
Owen organised the first Mashed Library - a series of unconferences for people interested in libraries and technology. He feels awkward writing about himself in the third person and I blog at Overdue Ideas.
What I found hardest about using Git the first time was…
Becoming familiar with, and remembering, terminology and commands. Everytime I wanted to do something I found myself having to go back and look up the documentation. My use of Git and Github tends to be at a very basic level. I’ve only occasionally used them to collaborate on code, and more commonly used them for personal version control and sharing code online. I got over the initial hurdle by using a simple GUI client instead of relying on the command line. I think the first one I tried was Tower but I then found GitBox which I liked (and it helped it was substantially cheaper than Tower!). I still use GitBox for the most straightforward tasks such as:
- Creating/Adding new repositories
- Committing changes with messages
- Creating new branches
But when I need to do more than this, it’s back to the documentation and the command line :)