A GitHub Workshop & why Version Control is a Technical Skill

On April 11th, 2018 I’m giving a workshop in Des Moines, IA to the Des Moines Area Quality Assurance Association (DAQAA) called Contributing to GitHub Is for You (join us!) on learning to use git with GitHub. The workshop is based on a presentation I did with Matt Heusser called Contributing to GitHub is for Everyone from the OnlineTestConf last year.

One important technical skill of increasing importance is using version control (also referred to as source control) systems. For those un-familiar version control systems give the user the ability to track changes to code, text, html, images and pretty much any other file you want. This in turn gives the user the ability to accept, reject or restore changes to individual files on a granular level. Whether you want to look at code, documentation, file bugs, backup important files, or create a website you are increasingly likely to do this in version control.

At Laurel & Wolf people outside of our engineering team like Product, UX, legal have GitHub accounts just so they can have insight into what’s going on, what might be shipped, see what legal disclaimers we are using, etc. This is in addition to JIRA which is more broadly used across groups in the org.

According to the latest Stack Overflow developer survey git is the most popular source control system in use today. It’s probably due in no small part to GitHub’s increasing popularity. (Or is that a chicken and egg problem?) Github is increasingly the place to host your public and private files and has given rise to the GitHub workflow aka create a branch, add commits, open a pull request, review code, and deploy. It’s a workflow that many companies and projects now use daily.

This means if you can use git to push changes to GitHub you can become technically fluent in basic software delivery. If it sounds interesting come join us or watch the shorter presentation mentioned above!