2019-09-06
Most of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering
experience. But there is one tip that I can offer you with
absolute confidence: Use sunscreen
version control.
And when I say version control, I mean git.
If you're a software developer, then you will already know what I'm talking about. But if you're not then you probably won't; and when I begin trying to explain your eyes may well glaze over.
Like that bit in the IT Crowd where Moss is explaining his code to Jen and all she hears is white noise:
But if we translate the jargon of software versions into the ordinary realm that most of us inhabit, what we are really talking about is a way of managing changes in any text file. Forget the white noise of computer code, and imagine instead that you are poet writing a sonnet for your beloved: you open your favourite text editor, and you start your first draft:
You are like the shining sun,
With one look my heart you won.
A single ray of beauty bright
like daylight dispersed my night...
You save that first draft as sonnet.txt, but immediately you
decide to try and improve it:
Shall I compare you to a summer day?
What a silly thing to try and say!
But my heart was wintry, dark and cold,
Until you came, like light, like Spring, like May...
Is that better? Is it worse? You're not sure, so you save it as
sonnet-v2.txt. You keep hacking away at it, attempting to turn your
heartfelt passion into eloquent poetry. At some point you finally
achieve the heights of this:
Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date...
And you promptly fall asleep at your keyboard. You awake in the morning,
filled with a sense of exultant triumph, and delete all your files
except for the final sonnet-v17.txt, and open it up to print it out --
but then realize that this is the wrong version of your text. You must
have saved it in sonnet-v15-edit-3.txt or something...
The point I'm trying to make is that git isn't just for hackers, it's
also for
poets.
It's for everyone who works with text files on computers. Except
admittedly it's a bit impenetrable. We'll come to that in our next post.