The Night Version Control Saved My Project

GitHub and Me

The Night Version Control Saved My Project Discussion 3

Presented By: Sebastien Perez

Introduction Since I'm in Canada now for school, I've been thinking a lot about my BSIT days in the Philippines.

It's crazy the kind of habits you pick up that, you realize, matter more later. I'm going to tell you one story. It's the night GitHub saved my project before I completely screwed it up.

The Setup During a group project in the Philippines, I was in charge of a certain part of our project code, and the night before our deadline I decided to make some cleaning tweaks to it.

The Mistake What happened was I mistakenly rewrote my fully functioning code file with a bad and incomplete version of itself, and to add to it, the bad version of the code couldn't even run! And the deadline was a few hours away, which gave me that specific panic that hits you when it's your mistake, and could cause the team to lose points on the project.

Save 1

The Save Luckily for me, because I had been making progress commits regularly (another habit that I made a practice while I was still a beginner in programming), I simply went back to the repository on GitHub, searched for the last working commit that I made before I broke my code, and then simply reverted it back and submitted my team with my code just in time.

Save 2

Reflection Back now in Canada, that night still matters to me a lot. It was my first time to see why version control is not just something our professors mention and we forget about it afterwards, but actually protects our code. It's funny how that night, on the other side of the world from here in Canada, made me value documentation and backups so much more.

Thank you so much !