In my current project we shared code among a few team members without impacting the others using Git. Since it happened twice and I already forgot it once, I put it here as a personal reminder. Hopefully it will help you too.

Imagine you’re working on a feature and a teammate wants to use your code. But you’re not finished, your code might break the build or some other functionality is broken. You have a few choices. You can send a patch. You can accept that the build is going to be broken. Or you can use Git and create a temporary branch for the sub-team to work on.

Setting up

Let’s say you need to work on a new feature. First you create your branch:
git checkout -b myfeautre

The feature takes longer than expected. And you need help. But your changes will break the application and you don’t want to impact every one. So you push your branch back to origin:
git push origin myfeature

Get work done (with some help)

Those who want to help you can create their own local branch.
git fetch
git branch myfeature origin/myfeature

I suggest you delete your own local branch and create another one as above. Your new branch will be linked to origin/myfeature so push/pull will work as usual. If you know another way to do this without deleting your branch, please tell me.

To sent your changes back to origin/myfeature, simply do

git push origin myfeature

Now everyone involved in the feature can commit as they wish.

Cleaning up

When you’re ready to merge back to master:
git checkout master
git merge myfeature

Then delete your old branches once everything is working:
git branch -d myfeature # deletes your local branch
git push origin :myfeature # deletes the remote branch

Gotcha:
If you push using git push, it will push every thing from every branches, including master. Make sure all your branches are in a stable state when pushing. Otherwise you can push a single branch:
git push origin myfeature

I you feel I missed anything, don’t hesitate to tell me.

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Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them – Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Jonathan was in a rut. Despite his best efforts on FreeFall’s brand new mega-project, nothing seemed to click. Everything just felt wrong. He could not quite put his finger on it, but he just knew something was going terribly wrong. Feeling powerless, everyday he got more and more anxious about the whole ordeal.

Once the project started to go haywire, FreeFall started to panic. Having a limited budget for outside ressources, despite losing millions on the project, they decided to hire Erol as a single Agile coach to do an assessment of the situation.

One day Jonathan and Erol met at the cafeteria where Erol had basically set up his office. Erol felt there was no better place to start conversations with people than the cafeteria. Things that people would never of said in official meetings, Erol was told in a matter of minutes. This jump-started his information collection like nothing else.

“I know you are here to help us” said Jonathan.
“I also feel that everything seems wrong but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Can you help me with that ?”
“If you’ve got five minutes, I’ve got a real story that might help you.”

Jonathan grabbed himself a coffee while Erol told him the following story:
“When I was young, I grew up in Haiti. I lived on the same street as all of my family. This was great when parties were thrown. We’d just get all together outside and party until the sun came up and then we’d party some more.”

“Christmas tradition was to cook a huge turkey based on the family recipe that came all the way from my great-grandmother.”

“The final step of the recipe was to chop a part of the turkey off before putting it in the oven”

“At six years old, my sister asked my mother why she was cutting off a part of the turkey. She said it was because her mother did it like that”

“So my sister asked my grandmother why she did it like that.”
“She said because your great-grand mother did it like that.”

“She then went on to see her great grand-mother”
“She asked her why she cut off a part of her turkey”
“She said, that she used to do it like that because her oven was too small to fit a turkey back then”

“You see, for generations, my family had been throwing away a part of their turkey for no good reason. If my sister did not challenge every member of my family until she found the root of the problem, we would of been throwing away turkey for generations to come even though the answer had lied next door for years.”

“Maybe I should start challenging what seems wrong” – said Jonathan
“Maybe you should Jon, maybe you should…”

-Nicholas Lemay

I started using git about three months ago. I just love it. I had lost touch with the joy of using a VCS from the prompt. I was getting pretty used to CVS at the time. Then I entered the dark era of Clearcase. Most features were available from Windows Explorer so I got used to that. And I continued after for about a year using SVN with Tortoise. I could have gone back to my beloved prompt but I had lost my way.

Then came Git. And a host of neat little features that made me want to switch right away.

The first thing I loved about Git : you don’t have any .svn folders in your project tree. Only a single .git folder at the root. Which means that you can use any tool you want to move and rename your classes and git will figure it out somehow. With SVN you had to be more careful – it happened in two of my project when someone (once it was me) thought it was a good idea to move a folder without a tool blessed by the SVN Gods. Bad idea – since the .svn folder is also moved, SVN still believes that it is committing files to the old directory.

With Git that’s a thing of the past. It’s a small thing but only this made me want to switch.

Then on my first Git project we merged two completely different repositories preserving the history of all the files. Nice.

And it’s very easy to get started. No need to setup a remote repository. You can have most of the power of git with a local repo. ‘git init’ and you’re ready to start. I now use it with all my projects, not matter how small.

And from then on, Git became favorite source control.

What are you waiting for? Try it! You won’t regret it!

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Tout a commencé à la fin de ma première mission en clientèle.
Fort d’un an et demi passé à apprendre, à coder, à m’essayer dans le TDD, à observer des développeurs de différents horizons…, je me suis rendu compte que le métier de développeur parfois dénigré est en réalité une profession à part entière qui nécessite beaucoup de compétences et de rigueur.

À la fin de cette mission je me suis beaucoup questionné sur le rôle de développeur à Pyxis. Je me suis notamment demandé :

• En quoi se différencie-t-on des autres?
• Qu’est-ce que peut espérer un client en confiant un projet à des développeurs de Pyxis?
• Quelles sont les valeurs d’un développeur de Pyxis?
• Comment fait-on pour être des exemples de ce que l’on propose à nos clients?

À la suite d’une discussion à l’interne sur la place d’un développeur à Pyxis, il y a une réponse qui m’a particulièrement plu et que j’ai voulu approfondir.
Dans sa réponse, Vincent Tencé a défini un ensemble de valeurs caractérisant sa vision du développeur de Pyxis.
Cette vision m’a éclairé sur la nécessité de définir une Charte du développeur que j’ai élaborée après un an de travail collaboratif.

Bonne lecture!

If you read yesterday’s post and wonder where you can find motivation to start to practice, look at this. It’s a screencast of Uncle Bob doing a Code Kata. A simple exercise, but if you look at the screencast you can guess he practices more than a few times.

I was tired tonight, but that’s going to keep me going

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There is no secret to developing a new skill.

Practice. Again. And again.

Looks like you need to practice a skill for 10000 hours before you can master it. That’s around 10 years of deliberate practice. This applies to Olympic athletes, musicians, and… programmers.

That’s one of the idea behind Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.
The idea was also explored in Pragmatic Thinking and Learning.
Also see Peter Norvig’s ‘Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years‘

So what have you practiced lately?

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Le premier European Learning Exchange a eu lieu à Paris le week-end du 31 octobre 2009. Il s’agissait d’un forum ouvert sur les forums ouverts (plus d’informations sur les forums ouverts sur : les slides de présentations

Il a été organisé par Christine Koehler (de l’institut Open Space France) et Luc Bizeul (du Réseau francophone sur les forums ouverts) il a été animé par Mia Konstantinidou).

Pyxis a été mécène de l’événement afin d’appuyer les initiatives visant à développer les approches liées à l’intelligence collective en France. Pyxis utilise aussi largement les forums ouverts en interne et c’était l’occasion pour l’équipe française (il y avait 6 Pyxissiens présents) de rencontrer et d’échanger avec des patriciens de toute l’Europe et de voir comment utiliser au mieux cet outil dans le cadre de notre aventure humaine.

Voici les comptes rendus des discussions : Book_of_proceedings

et les retours de blog :

http://www.qualitystreet.fr/2009/09/17/forum-ouvert-learning-exchange-paris-2009/

http://perquem.canalblog.com/archives/2009/10/31/15712226.html http://perquem.canalblog.com/archives/2009/11/01/15714057.htmlhttp://raphael.pierquin.com/blog/2009/10/une-organisation-regie-par-la-loi-des-2-pieds/

http://raphael.pierquin.com/blog/2009/11/gourverner-avec-loi-des-2-pieds-comment-ca-marche/

les photos de l’évènement : http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopheducamp/sets/72157622571970099/ http://picasaweb.google.com/phil.antoine/ImagesBoscop?locked=true&feat=content_notification# http://www.flickr.com/photos/44404585@N06/

et la vidéo du cercle de clôture : http://www.vimeo.com/7428911

Il y aura à nouveau des évènements liés aux forums ouverts en France, plus d’informations sur http://fosurfo.blogspot.com/