Now, I’m still a newbie in using Git, but I did use CVS and SVN over the years. I won’t bore you with the technical details which I may not know exactly.

I used Git recently at GeekMeet24 (and pushed Calin towards it too ) and looking back I see the main advantages as those towards increasing productivity:

1. Get up and running fast.

You NEED some kind of revision control. If you’re not using one for even a small project you’re not really a good developer.

Sadly, there still are developers not always using revision control, but my view is that they find their current solution too cumbersome/hard to set up for any small project and that’s why they don’t use it.

In Git this means going to a folder and executing “git init”, I dare you to configure a svn repository faster.

2. Work disconnected

While it’s hard to find a place without an internet connection these days, and some of us carry our 3G modems everywhere with us, it’s still good to know you don’t need “the server” for every little thing you do. It also makes Git faster but really the biggest advantage of being able to work offline is the next one:

3. Be more confident/agile

In SVN for example, all your commits/branches go to “the central server”. This automatically makes you commit and branch less because you either are not confident to show your half-finished work to your colleagues who have access to the repository; or because you don’t want to clutter the central branch list with many experimental branches. The result is less information about the progress of the project, about what changed in what order and maybe even losing some work or source code.

With Git you can continue to commit early and often, locally. All the change/progress information is preserved but you don’t need to push to a central repository. This makes you more confident in yourself (since you’re only committing) locally but also in the end you have much better information about the code. You’re also using branches more effectively because you aren’t afraid to do anything locally and can organize yourself better. And if just one of the other developers wants to look at your unfinished work, he can just pull the changes from your repository, no need to bother everyone.

I think this is one of the best “features” of Git but also the one which really requires a change in mindset and not only technology. Sadly, technology is the easiest thing to change.

To continue our training in Git and to start to teach others I have already proposed to Valentin Bora, Horia Dragomir, Calin Don and Mihai Oaida that we should hold some presentation/workshop on Git at the next GeekMeet in Timisoara. Feel free to add any suggestions

Now for the longer version..

So this past weekend ( 26-27th of February ) I participated at GeekMeet24. Everyone gathered, teamed-up, and did their best to end up with a good web application at the end of the weekend.

I was involved in the Freeconomy project, meant as an easy way to share or give away unused items. Social-sharing you may call it, so of course we built a social app on the Facebook platform

The Freeconomy team was: Teo (original idea) Calin (programming), Alina (copywriting), Cristi (design) and Me (programming).

It was a very full two days (12 hours in each day actually), with lots of discussions, lots of coding. Sure, it was somewhat tiring but in the end we all learned a lot and felt better for the experience.

What I did:

Programming in PHP, using the CakePHP framework and working with the Facebook API. So mainly things which I don’t do usually, but I think that’s the best part. I learned a lot of new things during the development of the project.

The more special roles I consider I took are:

- hosting provider: I set up a subdomain, vhost, and anything else needed so we could have the application online as fast as possible. This is a must to fully test how the application will behave in a real environment.

- git advocate: not that I know git very well or that Calin took a lot of convincing, but I feel it helped us a lot.

What went well:

We communicated without problems and everyone shared their opinions. That’s always good in any process, not only software development.

From the programming side, we weren’t afraid to refactor/rewrite anything.

Maria Diaconu kept “bugging” us to FOCUS! Although my reaction at the moment didn’t show it, I know it helped all of the teams.

What difficulties we encountered:

Most difficulties were encountered with the Facebook platform. Not that the API isn’t good, but it’s just a lot to take in at once.

Also, I usually prefer to test everything locally but with a Facebook app there’s some things which really must go through Facebook for you to see how they will behave. This also somewhat hindered a fully-parallel development process.

We didn’t finish everything we set up to do but that was to be expected. We’re still working on the application and will have more updates soon.

I’ll probably add more information as I remember it…

On the organizational/logistical side the whole team of GeekMeet24 were great.  The space was big enough for all the teams, we had all the necessary conditions and were very well-fed ( Thanks KFC ). KFC, Pizza, Cola, Power sockets, nice company, we had all of them.

Also, great thanks to Radu Ticiu from the Timisoara Software Business Incubator for giving us the space and the right conditions to work in. I don’t know if we could have found a better place anywhere else and hope to enjoy more events there in the future

Some personal conclusions which I’ll take to the next similar project:

- Always use revision control and set it up as fast as possible. Git of course is the fastest and easiest to set up so it’s a clear winner for small of time-constrained projects where you don’t want to waste even an hour configuring SVN or something else.

- You can’t build a web application locally, always have some remote server configured. You especially want to avoid the problems that it works on your machine but not after deploying to your hosting environment.

- I’m gonna be more organized.