Why Git Should Be the First Thing a Developer Learns and Not Code

Last Edit: Tue Nov 21 2023

Image Credits: Yancy Min - Unsplash

You seriously should learn version control - git in this case - before you write your first 'Hello World' code. If you've already been learning to code but haven't yet begun studying git, no worries; you can learn it at any time during your programming career. My advice however is to learn it as early as possible, preferably before you start learning programming itself.

So what is git?

Git is one of the many version control systems available. It is distributed in nature and fully open source. Services like GitHub and GitLab will let you host your git repositories. Git is available to a wide range of operating systems, that is, if not all of them. So if you have not yet, then after reading this, I suggest you download git and create a GitHub account!

Why learn it first?

As previously stated, you should learn git before coding, and here's why:

1. Track your progress

If you don't have a clearly defined learning path, programming might be intimidating. It's much worse when you can't seem to recall what
you've learned. You can keep track of what you've learnt and when you learned it using git and GitHub. You can view all of the modifications
you made to your code while learning and, if possible, strive to improve it as you gain more experience. Because it is common knowledge that as a developer, learning never ends, therefore, being able to track your progress over the years will help you:

Find out what learning methods work best for you.
Understand the time of the day that you have been most productive when learning
Recognize how long it takes you to complete a project after starting
a course. This will help you determine how long it takes you to grasp
concepts - this is crucial, and you will realize it as your developer
career progresses.
Take pride in your professional advancement. Isn't it cool to see how your 'one day I will learn how to code and earn from it🤔' turned to 'day one on my new job!🎉' ?

2. Showcase you work/progress

Making your learning progress available on GitHub or any other code-hosting platform allows others to know at which point your are in your career. While not all employers will look at your GitHub profile before hiring you, some will. You primarily want to demonstrate to these employers the amount and kind of knowledge you have. It demonstrates your ability to handle a large amount of work, your interests and problem-solving skills (depending on the kind of projects you build while learning) and most significantly it showcases your professionalism, how organised you are and how you will integrate with the team.

3. Learn from your mistakes

With git and GitHub you can revisit the code you wrote in the past. This means you can improve on the code as you learn new concepts. You can get to know your previous bad practices and what kind of good practices you adopted early in your career. Whether you brag to your earlier self by replacing a bruteforce algorithm with the shiny new algorithm that you just learned and observing the differences in performance and readability or replacing a whole block of code with a one-liner😎, is up to you. After all, the best way to learn good practices is by unlearning the bad practices.

4. Improving your team work

If you are learning coding, chances are that you have friends, an online community, fellow learners at a bootcamp or college classmates that are learning alongside you. Collaborating on a project with them will greatly improve your teamwork skills. You can learn from other developers like yourself and set yourself up in a path of open source contribution.

5. Save time when you will later be coding

Many will agree that learning code isn't some sort of a history lesson where everything you learn will probably just sticks in your brain. Face it, most of the stuff you learn you will end up forgetting. When working on a project as a developer, a lot of time is spent searching for a particular problem online. Most of this are stuff that you learnt. Saving your learning progress on GitHub means you can go back to it as a reference, saving you time that would be spent searching through Stackoverflow, the documentation or wherever else.

6. Eventually you will still have to learn it

No mater what programming language, development stack or area of specialisation you decide to focus on, one this is for sure, you will work with git. Git is the most common version control and is used in all those tech companies you would like to work in. Learning it early in your journey means that later when looking for a job, you can spend your time perfecting your skills or prepping for the interviews.

Where to learn git

You can learn git from its official documentation, however, if documentations seem daunting to you you can learn from a course that I will be publishing here -> https://learnfromvictor.netlify.app/courses/git-mastery-for-all-audiences/

Footnote: If you enjoyed reading this, share it with friends. You can also follow me on social media.