Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 9, 2017

Flight rules for git – How to Distinguish Between Astronauts and Programmers

Filed under: Documentation,Git,Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 7:54 pm

Flight rules for git by Kate Hudson.

From the post:

What are “flight rules”?

A guide for astronauts (now, programmers using git) about what to do when things go wrong.

Flight Rules are the hard-earned body of knowledge recorded in manuals that list, step-by-step, what to do if X occurs, and why. Essentially, they are extremely detailed, scenario-specific standard operating procedures. […]

NASA has been capturing our missteps, disasters and solutions since the early 1960s, when Mercury-era ground teams first started gathering “lessons learned” into a compendium that now lists thousands of problematic situations, from engine failure to busted hatch handles to computer glitches, and their solutions.

— Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life.

Hudson devises an easy test to distinguish between astronauts and programmers:

Astronauts – missteps, disasters and solutions are written down.

Programmers – missteps, disasters and solutions are programmer/sysadmin lore.

With Usenet and Stackover, you can argue improvement by programmers but it’s hardly been systematic. Even so it depends on a “good” query returning few enough “hits” to be useful.

Hudson is capturing “flight rules” for git.

Act like an astronaut and write down your missteps, disasters and solutions.

NASA made it to the moon and beyond by writing things down.

Who knows?

Writing down software missteps, disasters and solutions may help render all systems transparent, willingly or not.

November 5, 2014

Pro Git

Filed under: Git,Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 8:20 pm

Pro Git

From the webpage:

The entire Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub and published by Apress, is available here. All content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license. Print versions of the book are available on Amazon.com.

Available on the web, in PDF, mobi, or ePub form for free and in a variety of languages.

At five hundred and seventy-four (574) pages I suspect it covers any subtlety of Git that you will need.

Pass this along!

November 8, 2013

Restructuring the Web with Git

Filed under: Git,Github,Subject Identity — Patrick Durusau @ 8:04 pm

Restructuring the Web with Git by Simon St. Laurent.

From the post:

Web designers? Git? Github? Aren’t those for programmers? At Artifact, Christopher Schmitt showed designers how much their peers are already doing with Github, and what more they can do. Github (and the underlying Git toolset) changes the way that all kinds of people work together.

Sharing with Git

As amazing as Linux may be, I keep thinking that Git may prove to be Linux Torvalds’ most important contribution to computing. Most people think of it, if they think of it at all, as a tool for managing source code. It can do far more, though, providing a drastically different (and I think better) set of tools for managing distributed projects, especially those that use text.

Git tackles an unwieldy problem, managing the loosely structured documents that humans produce. Text files are incredibly flexible, letting us store everything from random notes to code of all kinds to tightly structured data. As awesome as text files are—readable, searchable, relatively easy to process—they tend to become a mess when there’s a big pile of them.

Simon makes a good argument for the version control and sharing aspects of Github.

But Github doesn’t offer any features (that I am aware of) to manage the semantics of the data stored at Github.

For example, if I search for “greek,” I am returned results that include the Greek language, Greek mythology, New Testament Greek, etc.

There are only four hundred and sixty-five (465) results as of today but even if I look at all of them, I have no reason to think I have found all the relevant resources.

For example, a search on Greek Mythology would miss:

Myths-and-myth-makers–Old-Tales-and-Superstitions-Interpreted-by-Comparative-Mythology_1061, which has one hundred and four (104) references to Greek gods/mythology.

Moreover, now having discovered this work should be returned on a search for Greek Mythology, how do I impart that knowledge to the system so that future users will find that work?

Github works quite well, but it has a ways to go before it improves on the finding of documents.

April 26, 2012

Git: the NoSQL Database

Filed under: Git,NoSQL — Patrick Durusau @ 6:31 pm

Git: the NoSQL Database

Brandon Keepers has a nice slide deck on using Git as a NoSQL database.

If you have one of his use cases, consider Git.

I recommend the slidedeck more for his analysis of what is or is not possible with Git.

All too often the shortcomings of a database or ten year old code is seen as fundamental rather than accidental.

Accidents, like mistakes, can be corrected.

February 28, 2012

git-oh-$#!†

Filed under: Git — Patrick Durusau @ 8:42 pm

git-oh-$#!† by Kristina Chodorow.

From the post:

I’ve learned a lot about git, usually in a hurry after I mess up and have to fix it. Here are some basic techniques I’ve learned that may help a git beginner.

I have always found humor to be a good tool for teaching material you want remembered. See what you think.

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