Jon Cairns

Over recent years we've seen the software community debate the usefulness of comments (this article being an example), and rightly so. The main argument is against explanatory comments, i.e. "this code is doing X", as the ideal situation is that the code is written in a way that means it's readable and self-explanatory. The problem with comments like this is that they easily become out of date, as someone makes a quick change to the code without reading and updating the associated comment. You then have the issue of a comment which directly contradicts the code it's meant to be explaining.

Git is such a complex tool that I often feel as if I'm barely using 10% of it's complete functionality. The various commands range from the absolutely essential (commit, push, pull) to the more exotic (cherry-pick, rebase), to the downright obscure or scary (fsck, merge-octopus, quiltimport). You can generally get by with knowing the basic functions of a small set of commands, that allow you to push, pull, commit, change branches and merge. However, this list compiles 6 commands that you may not know about that have seriously improved the way in which I use git.

I am, in fact, alive. Mere busyness seems like a luxury at the moment; I feel like I have achieved whatever is the next level above. However, I have found time (an overwhelmingly extravagant 5 minutes) to update my git submodule tutorial. Which is about updating git submodules. Some sort of recursive madness, it seems.

Git submodules are a way of linking to a repository inside another. For example, if your project needs to use someone else's project that's hosted on Github then you can use it as a submodule rather than including all the code from that project. This has the added benefit of being able to track and include changes from the submodule repo, rather than having to update project files yourself.