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.

When I first heard about git bisect I thought it sounded scary and complicated, so I never looked for an opportunity to learn more about it and use it. That’s until last week when I ran into a bug in our master branch. I knew that the bug was not there two days before so I tested an earlier commit and confirmed that that older commit was a good one. Now, we had tens of commits in between. How to find out when exactly the bug was introduced? It would be impractical to check and test each individual commit.

I don’t write much about Rails here but whoa, two posts in a row! Well, it turns out that I thought I should record another lesson I learned while upgrading Rails: how to do it, meaning, what are the practical steps one should take to upgrade Rails?

I was recently tasked with upgrading our Ruby on Rails application at work: my goal was to move two major versions up, with a middle step on a minor version (and a server OS upgrade that was not even planned!). This was an incredible experience and I learned a lot from it. Here are some take-aways I can share:

Learning Go (a.k.a as Golang) was one of my personal goals for 2019 and I chose the book “Get Programming with Go”, by Nathan Youngman and Roger Peppe as my learning resource. Even though there are several other resources out there, I chose this book because they state on their website that “[it] introduces you to the powerful Go language without confusing jargon or high-level theory” and I like to have a physical book to reference to when learning a new code language. Go is also my first statically typed language, so I was looking for something that would walk me through from the very basics.