Git-sim: Visually simulate Git operations in your own repos
This looks promising as a teaching aide. At my previous company, I transitioned our project from Clearcase to Git to save us licensing and administration fees. Many of the senior developers, who had never used Git, had a hard time understanding it, and I spent many whiteboard sessions explaining by drawing similar graphs. This would give those developers more autonomy, and stop the “let me blow it away and start over”, which would drive me nuts. Devs spent a lot of time and frustration performing that operation.<p>I believe the core issue is devs like above never take the time to “grok” Git. I believe part of this is due to the lack of a tool like above to teach easily, but also because devs want to ignore the “how” of their tool working to find out the exact commands they need to run in their current situation.<p>One could argue users should not need to understand how their tool works to use it effectively and this is a leaky abstraction. Others could argue some commands are not intuitive (git reset can do many things, and git rebase swapping ours&#x2F;theirs comes to mind). I don’t claim Git is perfect, and sometimes I need to Google to learn more than I wanted to, to get out of an obscure scenario (e.g. someone put classified intelligence into a repository we need to transfer to a lower classification network; how do I rewrite the entire history while correcting this error that occurred 487 commits ago?). However, understanding the tree structure of Git, what git rebase does under the covers, what branches and tags are, how remotes work, how merging works, etc. would go a LONG way. The folk I worked with struggled to pick it up.