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Ask HN: Low tech Git alternatives for non-software folks?
3 points by georgeburdell on Jan 10, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
I am the software engineer on a team of mostly hardware engineers who need to write automation code to aid their jobs. The industry I am in skews older, so my team is generally unfamiliar with coding, and if they are, aren’t up to date on best practices, as it is not their primary job.

Our manager has a software background and has decided on Git and GitHub as the systems of record for code version control. I have held many training sessions on these tools over my tenure (6mo), and many people caught on and can execute the procedures I established to record their changes. However, 2 of them do not seem to be able to learn it and I am spending my day before lunch cleaning up their commits, as they work at a frenetic pace (nights, weekends, holidays) and will seemingly type any command that makes their git errors go away (liberal use of rebase skips, force pushes, etc.)

The problem is not necessarily how they use Git, it’s that they’re actually quite productive while creating externalities for me, who was hired to write infrastructure code. I am considering to stop using Git altogether (or perhaps create a firewall for these two), but what system could replace it? The “low tech” the better. Ideally, there would be no extra software to learn.




> my team is generally unfamiliar with coding, and if they are, aren’t up to date on best practices, as it is not their primary job.

Slightly off topic but this such a problem nowadays. Coding is everywhere now but it's treated like "it's only software", especially from people who are in more traditional engineering disciplines.

This is partly a cultural issue but it's also technical. Software engineering / coding workflows are expected to be roughly the same whenever there is coding involved. In classical engineering the processes and the mental models of how to develop a product are completely different to modern software engineering which creates the tooling vacuum that you describe.


Have you tried GitHub Desktop? https://desktop.github.com/


Maybe giving them a git GUI rather than commands to run would be better. You have to merge their work somehow. Limiting the commands they can use would be helpful. You might consider using Bitbucket, which has much better branch & operation permission capabilities, like being able to block force pushes based on branch naming patterns

tl;Dr this sounds like a people / process issue more than a tooling issue. Try to understand why they feel so rushed that they don't slow down to do it the right way. I suspect certain (anecdotal) cultural traits endemic in hardware companies.


Yes I've been evaluating Git GUIs (TortoiseGit being my front runner right now) and I hope that will at least reduce the number of botched conflict resolutions.

As much as I want to pin it on these two, this isn't a software group and infra should not get in the way of the job at hand. This is my first time being in a supporting role for the "real workers" in the group and it's been challenging


You might think of yourself less as "infra" and more of building the product delivery experience for the team. It's more about servicing the people than wiring together tools, though that is the implementation part. Think about spending more time communicating, introspecting, instructing and proposing. Make their life easier, make their work harder to get wrong. Give them training wheels and tracer bullets over rigid rules and bureaucracy.

Be patient with them and yourself




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