Learning to Code and failing seem to go hand in hand. Or at least for me they do. Yesterday, I was reminded of the Thomas Edison quote, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” I lost a lot of hair being frustrated when things didn’t work and I kept getting error messages or code I thought I had deleted kept resurrecting itself faster than Jesus and Lazarus.
I was building a new site experimenting with using GitHub as a way to backup my code and maintain a version control, however it likely would have helped if I knew how to use the version control system better. Previously I had tried cloning a repository, but that too ended up in failure. In the end I started with a clean sheet. I was great at saving my code to GitHub, even tried the rollback function, the hard reset, but oh no, code resurrected itself still. I lost count of the number of times I lost out to the computer, but suffice it to say the column for my score remained blank, while the other team’s score has yet to stop increasing…I may have reached Edison’s 10,000 by now.
Well worth the effort to learn git and use GitHub! Source Tree https://www.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/overview/ is a good tool to help manage git. I don’t use it for the basic functions such as add, commit or branch, but its useful if you have to do something tricky like commit some of your changes but discard others.