David Demaree - Git for Humans

WHEN I STARTED making websites as a hobby in 1995, being a web developer meant knowing HTML. Thats it. Neither JavaScript nor CSS would ship in browsers for a year, and Flash wouldnt exist until later in the decade. The web was just starting to become a rich medium full of engrossing content, and anyone with a text editor who could remember a dozen or so tags could participate. It was nice.

Twenty years later, web development is no longer so simple. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript remain the foundation of our work, but over their historytheir recent history in particulartheyve evolved from languages for crafting documents, simple enough that most designers could write them from memory, into a platform for writing applications. It feels like we dont make web pages anymore; we make themes or templates or, if were really ambitious, we make apps. Were producing thousands of lines of increasingly complex code, and were sharing responsibility for managing that code with more people, in more and more ways. We have the power to make truly amazing things for our users, things we never could have imagined when the web was youngbut at the cost of feeling like gerbils running on a technology treadmill.

Frank Chimero put it well ( http://bkaprt.com/gfh/00-01/ ):

Now is the time to come clean: GitHub is confusing, Git is confusinger, pretty much everything in a modern web stack no longer makes sense to me, and no one explains it well, because they assume I know some fundamental piece of information that everyone takes for granted and no one documented, almost as if it were a secret that spread around to most everyone sometime in 2012, yet I somehow missed, becauseyou knowlife was happening to me, so Ive given up on trying to understand, even the parts where I try to comprehend what everyone else is working on that warrants that kind of complexity, and now I fear that this makes me irrelevant, so I nestle close to my story that my value is my ideas and capability to make sense of things, even though I cant make sense of any of the abovebut really, maybe Im doing okay, since its all too much to know. Let the kids have it.

Git is hardly the most complicated new web technology, but its a part of this new stack that all parts of the stack have in common. You cannot escape Git if you want to participate in the new platform-y web. At some point youll need to contend with it, either directly or as a transport mechanism used by some other tool. And that may very well be why Git is a poster child for this sea change in how we make websites.

Plenty of books, blog posts, and other online materials have cropped up to teach users at all levels how to use Git. Yet despite this wealth of tutorials, some days it feels like you cant turn around without bumping into someone complaining that Git makes no goddamned sense. And yet we use it. It seems like we have to use it, despite fearing that we cannot confidently use it, leaving us to feel like were running around the house with a big pair of scissors.

And its not just designers like Frank Chimero. Folks who are new to the web, or who want to work in fields only tangentially related to web development (like writing or open data), are also forced to live on a Git planet, as are tons of us who like the engineered web just fine, but who still feel flummoxed by Git.

Having spent most of the last decade using Git on almost every project, delving at times into some of the darkest, weirdest corners of Git behavior, I can safely say that its not you, its Git. Git isnt difficult because youre not smart enough, or because you missed an important meeting. Git is difficult because Git isdifficult