The problem

During a git merge or rebase, you see the following merge conflict message:

A while back I wrote about managing local git branches with git rebase and I mentioned that I always submit my code changes with one commit only. No matter how many commits I make during my development process in my local branch when I prepare my code for code review and push it to remote, I squash all commits into one single commit, with one single commit message using git rebase.

git is a very useful tool for software development and you only need to know a few commands to get most of the job done. However, you can be a lot more productive if you go beyond the basics.

A few months ago I got a new computer and I have been very intentional about deciding what I install on it. From past experience I know that computers that are used as a development environment tend to get messy in no time since one might install all kinds of libraries, frameworks, dependencies, you name it, and to makes matters worse, you will probably run into version conflicts for any or most of those things. Hardly ever a development environment is a clean environment and I don’t know about you but there are very few things that I find more frustrating than wasting time troubleshooting development environment set up. Let me write the code already!

A few years back when I got serious about learning to program to become a software developer, I remember hearing about version control and getting really confused about git and GitHub (one can add GitLab to this list also!). Are they the same thing? Eventually, I figured it out but this past week in a conversation with a coworker, who is interested in getting into software development, I noticed that they also were confused about this so I decided to write about it.