Configuration Management Reflection

31 Jan 2017

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Configuration Management Thoughts

I think that configuration management is an incredibly important and vital skill for every programmer. It allows you to accomplish many things, from having a history of your code that you can revert back to to easily collaborating on a project with other people. On this note, in the first ICS class that I ever took we had to complete a group project by the end of the semester. Since we were all beginners, we didn’t use any sort of configuration management and would just email each other the project when we did significant work on it. As you would expect, this was a nightmare to deal with as every group member would work on separate parts of the project and then we would spend a significant amount of time merging changes into the master version.

Git or Github?

Here’s an interesting question: Is git popular because of GitHub or is it the other way around? Since I’m a relatively new programmer (sincerely started in 2015) this is tough for me to answer as I wasn’t there to see the whole story, but I do believe the popularity of both comes from GitHub. GitHub simply came out with a better product than its competitors and became popular because of it, and it has just continually gotten more popular with no signs of being surpassed. When it comes to configuration management GitHub is the top name brand, and that name recognition is incredibly hard to lose. I had even heard of GitHub before I started programming, and because of this it was absolutely the first place that I went to once I needed some form of version control.