Configuration Managment

30 Jan 2017

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Configuration managment, I am sure it is so much more than a fancy buzz word. However, I have yet to work on a large scale software project, so I haven’t been in a situation to truely appreciate configuration management. I have learned enough about it and understand what goes into creating software to be able to appreciate it! The idea of keeping everything and everyone in sync seems daunting, so I am glad these systems were established before I entered the programming field!

Like I said, I haven’t worked on any large scale software projects, yet, but I have worked on a few smaller ones. Most of those cases were small projects in my early programming classes. We used email to send code back and forth. It was terrible, even for small projects! I understand that the professors wanted to focus on the programming languages themselves, but it seems ridiculous to set bad habits up for students who are new to the programming game. Even with a small project, it was very frustrating to not have a decent configuration management set up! There were times where I needed to see the most up to date version of the piece my partner was working on, and I had to email or call that person. Just waiting for responses back and forth was a major headache! It is clear that large scale projects would absolutley require a system like git.

So, do I think GitHub is popular because of git, or is git is popular because of GitHub? I am sure a more researched and science based answer exists out there, but my initial impression is a little bit of both. Git is a great technology and GitHub makes it an effective and easy choice to implement git. If such a simple way of implementing the technology didn’t exist, maybe git wouldn’t have taken over the configuration managment market like it did. I am hoping to come back with a much more informed opinion after I use it for a while!