git-exercises VS git-from-the-bottom-up

This is blog I wrote after attempting to complete Git exercise by fracz. So, speaking about git exercise it's a set of tasks that will give you a basic understanding of how Git works and various commands that you can try out. You can try out by going to Git Exercise, go here and follow the steps mentioned. So going further I am hoping you all know about what Git is and why it has great importance in this industry. Buckle up let's go for the adventure of understanding git.

Looks great!

I'm really missing support for remotes. There are lots of tools for local-only development (like https://gitexercises.fracz.com/), but very few allow to demonstrate stuff like "Syncing a GitHub fork with the original repository" which involves two remotes and three copies of the same branch at the very least.

It's worth it. You'll have to figure it out eventually. You might as well learn early to 1) save yourself time, and 2) make yourself look competent at your software engineering job. fracz's git-exercises are what helped it click for me.

Here's a great walk through for how Git works from the bottom up: https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/

It's short, easy to understand and you'll understand HEAD.

Very tangential:

Gerrit also stores some of its configs in a git repo. I was setting up a new instance, but couldn't get Admin permissions because the way my auth front-end didn't play well with the docker image's assumptions.

Gerrit already does a lot of its work via non-standard references. For example, you don't push to a branch, `refs/branches/foo`, you push to a separate `refs/for/foo` namespace that creates the review.

Similarly, Group config is stored in the All-Users git repo [1], but in references created after a UUID, in `refs/groups/UU/UUID`.

I ended up having a to exercise the plumbiest of plumbing commands [2] to create a new commit from scratch (from a tree, from the index, from blobs), to update the group ref to add myself to the Administrators group (this, of course, requires a local shell and permissions on the Gerrit host). It was a great way to exercise what I had learned in Git from the Bottom Up [3]

[1] https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/config-...

[2] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects

[3] https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/

I found Git from the Bottom Up helpful. It is very short as well. Then refer to the official book when you want more detail.

I recently came across "Git from the Bottom Up by John Wiegley" (thanks to Coding Blocks podcast), he has a chapter about rebasing: https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/1-Repository/7-branching-and-the-power-of-rebase.html

You won't have to put your entire life on break in order to understand the fundamentals of git and why it works the way it works. Going through https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/ and really understanding the material will take you a couple of hours at max, but will save you a lot of time in the future.

Wanting to understand things before using them is hardly elitism, not sure why you would think that.

Just like you probably don't want to fix bugs without understand the cause, it's hard to use a tool correctly unless you know how the tool works.