Tuesday 4 December 2012

Git yourself a schooling in Git

CodeSchool:

I've recently gone through a couple of courses from CodeSchool and have found them to be quite entertaining, unfortunatly they most courses are keyed towards web developers, but there were two courses on git that were totally worth wile for any developers. My badges: http://www.codeschool.com/users/PuZZleDucK

1. "Try Git" was breathtaking,  may I just start with a "wow" actually, make that a "oh, wow... are you for real". Fantastic use of technology here, the course is actually performed on a real live GitHub repo.  The only drawbacks were that it ended too soon as it is a low level introductory course, and it felt a bit scripted, but once again it is an intro course. My repo has now expanded to incorporate experiments from the next class and may even become a program in it's own right.

2. "Git Real" has a wonderfully cheesy intro to the videos, it is very thorough and if used right really forces you to learn the commands yourself. You view a 10ish minute video discussing git techniques, then you go through challenges. I must confess I did use "man git" on my local machine a couple of times to check the details of obscure commands, but I figure anywhere I can use "git" I can use "man git" too. The (very minor) drawbacks include not being able to use tab-completion and a couple of times I just wanted to get my bearings with commands like "git status" or "git branch", but I knew that if I typed in those commands the "marking system" would punish my self directed learning with a really good hint :D

Also there is a "freebie offer" at the moment called "Hall Pass" (which you will need if you want to do the "git Real" course) with free two day access:

Hall Pass: http://go.codeschool.com/LkD3Kg



Linux Users Victoria (December 04):


This month at Luv we had Martin Paulo speaking on Open stack who also happened to recommended The Innovators Dilemma as a good read... Sounds interesting, about how innovative companies get fixated on their innovation and fall behind in "everything else". Unfortunately he also pushed one of my buttons claiming that the object storage engine can store objects of size zero (Btrfs also makes this outrageous and misleading claim), meta data has a cost dammit! Zero plus meta data equals cheating... Zero plus meta data is not zero.

We also heared from Chris Samuel from VLSCI talking about the Blue gene/Q super computer in Melbourne called Avoca, including how it was the most powerful in the southern hemisphere... until a month ago. but I believe it is still is the worlds greenest super computer.

Edit: Adding peoples names :)