“In Image and in Likeness“

Catching Paragraph
that uses several seemingly irrelevant pieces of information to hook the reader.

Bible says that [G|g]od created humans “In Image and in Likeness“. While I am not that huge fan of Bible, I do believe that some things are not randomly written in this book.

“In Image and in Likeness” is the only way to structure, design, and create something. No wonder, that God created people “In Image and in Likeness” himself. He couldn’t do it any other way…

 

Git is no Εxception

Creating Git Version Control was also a miracle (thanks again Linus). And it was created to resemble human nature and psychology as well. I don’t claim that the author and developers had this in mind when they started their codebase, but I do believe that they couldn’t help it.
Humans are doomed to duplicate themselves. With more than one ways…

 

Today’s Proof of Concept

All Git operations have human-side equivalents. Equivalents that resemble life choices and personal mind tricks. Branching, committing, rebasing, all are ways a person feels and acts about things.

 

The Childhood

Git init

“Let there be light” (this is the last biblical reference, promise).
We can parallelize a person as a git repo. So here is what happens when a person is born:

God@Earth# NEW_PERSON="person-$(date +%s)-3"
God@Earth# mkdir $NEW_PERSON; cd $NEW_PERSON;
God@Earth# chroot . start_life $NEW_PERSON &

(the start_life executable starts by setting UID != 0, to avoid creating a new god.
This was the bug that created the Titans, Pantheon, Egyptian Gods and more, in the early years of development)

Because god runs Linux, and that’s for sure…

Then the person has its own process… It is alive! And this is what happens…

$ ls
$ ls -a
. ..
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /.git
$

Here, we have a new proje… person! All initialized and ready to fulfill its life goals…

 

Git add

As a new project, at first, a person adds everything that is inside the directory inside the repo. And this isn’t always good…

$ ls
mother.love    old_sister.love    father.love    mother.tongue    mother.bad_habits    father.drinking_problem
$ git add *
$ git status
On branch master

Initial commit

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)

    new file:   mother.bad_habits
    new file:   father.drinking_problem 
    new file:   mother.love
    new file:   old_sister.love
    new file:   father.love
    new file:   mother.tongue
$

A child sucks everything in its environment to slowly develop a personality. And carries all added things with it. But a personality isn’t actually created before the…

Initial Commit

And here we have the end of Childhood… A child with a discrete personality is a teenager. Almost not a child anymore…
And here is the line that differentiates the two:

$ git commit -m "Built personality PoC"
[master (root-commit) 46ae33f] Built personality PoC

 6 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 father.love
 create mode 100644 mother.love
 create mode 100644 mother.tongue
 create mode 100644 old_sister.love
 create mode 100644 father.drinking_problem 
 create mode 100644 mother.bad_habits
$

The Early Years

git commit

A commit happens every time a personal decision is made. As the commit is the most common command in git, it is also the most common mental condition in a person’s life. You commit every time consequences of your actions will affect you as a person. Just like a commit in git. It is a command that defines a state of you.

The .gitignore file!

A teenager starts to be more selective when adding things to his/her life. Tries to evaluate whether something is crucial for its development, or not.
A typical example of this is the following:

$ echo "mother.*" > .gitignore
$

This way a teenager permanently ignores all changes on its mother behavior, effectively carving its own way. One can add things to the .gitignore file as experience comes:

$ echo "*.assholes" >> .gitignore
$

Here we added the line to ignore all assholes, and prevent them from changing our life.

 

git branch

There are circumstances that you have to treat like a whole new person. There are events that need a whole fresh you when you first get into them, like relationships or hobbies. Events that every change they do to you, won’t affect you in other aspects of your life.

Let’s say that the teenager we left of, is a boy and is now ready to meet his first love “Lily”:

$ git status
On branch master
Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

    lily.love
$

He is going to be a boyfriend, trying to leave the rest of his life intact. He has to create a new life branch.

$ git branch boyfriend_of_lily
$

git checkout

Now, every time he is with Lily he can just:

$ git checkout boyfriend_of_lily
$

and develop his relationship with her. Adding some Lily-specific files, or changing some already created ones. Also all commits done when with Lily, will affect their relationship only, not the rest of his life (hopefully).

People have countless branches. Think about hobbies, jobs and people that need a specific version of us to operate us expected… I do not treat my colleagues like my parents and I don’t cook with the same attitude I play basketball.

Sometimes, a hobby, a person, a general condition becomes so vital to us that is not “yet another thing” we do. It is something special, something really important to us… When this time happens for one of our branches we have to…

git merge

Here is why git shines. When we have a great hobby, that really means a lot to us, we have to merge it into our master branch.

$ git checkout master
$ git merge hobby_that_defines_you

after that, our hobby is included in the master branch, meaning that is an essential part of ourselves.

Problems start when some branches of ours that we want to merge to our master branch, have changed our inner selves in such a way that contradicts our personality.
When this happens we have the most serious first world problem:

 

The Merge Conflict…

Let’s say that:
as a person you are cheerful and generally happy, but then you met that goth girl, that  hates smiling and always wears that ring with the skull on it that gives you the creeps.

You are yourself when out with your friends, and you checkout to your Emo branch when with your goth girl! Great, that’s what branches are all about. But then you have to go to a party, were both your friends and your girlfriend will be there. Trying to merge those two branches raises the issue:

$ git checkout party_with_friends
$ git merge goth_girlfriend
Auto-merging attitude
CONFLICT (add/add): Merge conflict in attitude
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.
$
$ cat attitude
<<<<<<< HEAD
Happy and ready for the party!
=======
Look like I hate myself.
>>>>>>> goth_girlfriend

This issue has to be resolved. The way to resolve it is to get to that file and remove anything that doesn’t really belong to you.

I believe that all psychological problems start with such conflicts. When merging, back to master, incompatible branches of our egos… This is because the heavy development has to be done in master branch. The heavy development and commiting has to be in ourselves. While gaining experience we learn when to merge. We also learn when to…

 

git rebase

When a huge event like a marriage, a job, a loss, a break-up happens, our whole life is then defined by it. Our personal history can be split to before the event and after the event periods. We can remember being completely different before the event.

But now that the event has happened and we have plenty of commits on its branch, it is really easier to adopt our master branch on the branch of the new event, than checkout again to our old and dusty self – master branch.

This is when a rebase happens. When we need to redefine ourselves on top of another event. Notice the difference with the merge. Merge puts some additional things to our master. Rebase redefines our master to include the additional things historically.

 

Concluding

And the list goes on!

• git cherry-pick, when we try to keep only the good stuff from a situation of ours,
• git blame when we try to find when we made the wrong choice and what went wrong,
• git tag when we accomplish something memorable.

The next time I get across someone that believes that computer science is far away from the human nature (there is such argument), I ‘ll answer 2 words (kinda)

$ git --help

*mic drop*