Commitmas 2015 Is Coming!

Last year, Matt Brender created the 12 Days of Commitmas, a short series of goals and articles on how to get started with Git and make it part of your daily workflow. This year, with the help of the vBrownBag crew, we’re making it bigger and better and calling it the 30 Days of Commitmas! Every workday between 12/1 and 12/30, excepting the 24th and 25th, there will be a new lesson paired with a recorded webinar. The lessons will be focused on a small goal and in the webinar, the presenter will run through the lesson plan and answer any questions presented. I’ll be presenting Rebasing with Git on 12/11.

If you’re relatively new to Git, or know it but haven’t made it part of your daily routine, I encourage you to jump in! We’ll have a little something for people of all skill levels. If you can’t participate in real time, the lessons and recorded webinars will also be available afterward.

If you know Git well, or at least well enough to give a 30-60 minute presentation to others, we could use your help! We need 8 more presenters, as of hitting publish on this post. For those interested in presenting, find an opening on the schedule (webinars are scheduled for 9pm Eastern, we may be able to make some exceptions) and reach out to me, Matt Brender, Cody Bunch, or Jonathan Frappier – or create a fork and submit a PR!

I hope to “see” you all there!

Technical Debt Analogies

Everyone should know what technical debt is, and everyone loves analogies. What better way to explain technical debt, then?

  • Technical debt is not something you fall into, it’s a purposeful assumption of debt. You don’t fall into technical debt, just like you don’t trip and end up with a mortgage on a house – you make the decision to buy a property on credit and go through the effort of ending up with a lot of debt.
  • Technical debt often has a grace period, but it eventually needs to be paid off. It can be like a student loan, you get 6 months after you graduate before you start to owe money.
  • Technical debt’s interest payments increase if you put off paying them. When you don’t pay your minimum payment on your credit card, you get hit with a late fee and your APR skyrockets. Same thing.
  • Rewriting your application to avoid technical debt is like bundling your mortage in a mortgage-backed security and selling it to someone else in your company. The debt didn’t go away and you get to avoid it, but you hurt the economy a little bit. And in the end, you probably end up with another mortgage (technical debt) anyway.

Have I missed any other good ones?