How Not to Be Afraid of Git, with O'Reilly Author Anna Skoulikari

The Scrimba Podcast

✨Use this link for a free month of O'Reilly Learning and read Anna's book and any other resource on the platform! ✨ Meet Anna Skoulikari! She's a UX designer turned front-end developer, senior technical writer, and the author of "Learning Git" - a book published by O'Reilly Media that teaches Git in a simple, visual, and tangible manner so that you can build a solid mental model of how it all works.

Anna started teaching Git because she had to understand it herself. It's powerful but not the most user-friendly of tools. Yet, Git is what we all have in common, whether we're working on back-end or front-end development, on Windows or a Mac. Even GitHub's lawyers use Git!

If you're learning to code, you probably have many questions. Should you use GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket? What's the difference between a merge request and a pull request? Does it make sense to use Git from your command line, or is a GUI good enough? Where are all those files? And how, for the last time, does any of that work? This episode will help you understand Git and provide you with plenty of practical insights to navigate its complexities effectively.

🔗 Connect with Anna

• 👩‍💼 Linkedin
• 🌐 Website

⏰ Timestamps

• Anna’s journey into coding via UX design (01:44)
• How Anna decided to conquer her fear of Git (02:25)
• What is Git? (03:28)
• What can you use Git for? (04:38)
• What is GitHub, and what other platforms are out there? (05:35)
• GitHub’s lawyers also use Git (07:58)
• Should you use Git for your own projects, even if you’re not collaborating with anyone? (08:27)
• What is branching? What is merging? (10:39)
• How do companies typically use Git? (12:14)
• Community Break with Jan the Producer (16:47)
• When should a new deveoloper start learning Git? (18:36)
• Git is a unifying technology (20:27)
• Why is the terminology around Git so confusing? (21:38)
• How Anna teaches Git: the colors of the rainbow (23:08)
• Making the four areas of Git tangible (25:12)
• How to use git: command line or GUI? (28:04)
• What are merge conflicts and how to handle them? (33:24)
• How to practice merge requests and conflicts? (35:47)
• How Anna decided to write a book on Git, and how O’Reilly chooses animals for the book covers (37:57)

🧰 Resources Mentioned

• Use this link for a free month of O'Reilly Learning!
• Learning Git

⭐️ Leave a Review

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star review here and tell us who you want to see on the next podcast.
You can also Tweet Alex from Scrimba at @bookercodes and tell them what lessons you learned from the episode so that he can thank you personally for tuning in 🙏 Or tell Jan he's butchered your name here.