How to use a version control system – properly In Company Culture

When I first started building small software, all the files existed on my development machine, and maybe they were backed up to Google Drive as regular files.

Then I got to know about GitHub, but I merely used it as a safe storage place for my code. I used the GitHub desktop app to commit all changes on just the master branch. I even hesitated using it through the command line.

Now not a day goes by that I don’t use Git. It’s such a great tool for collaboratively writing code, distributed development, branching out for new features, pull requests, and so on.

Here’s a little article on why version control systems are awesome!

I was a student at an engineering college in India. After 1 and a half years of learning computer science academically, I now had a chance to test my knowledge in the real world through an internship.

In this article, I’ll be sharing my internship experience at ZS Associates, Pune with the hope that it is helpful to other IT and computer engineering students who are looking for internships.

Like most of my colleagues at the college, I had a minimal view of software development in general and didn’t know what to expect from an internship.

Lucky for me, I was assigned a live project, which was based on Ruby on Rails, something that I had already developed an interest in.

After I had learned PHP and MySQL in the 2nd year of my studies, I built a basic web app, and all that it did was some CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Destroy) operations. I remember talking with a friend who had similar skills to mine, and said “Even we can build Facebook now that we know PHP and MySQL!”

How ridiculously simple things seemed at that time. Now I understand how complex building/maintaining a software can be.

So here’s what I learned from my Internship while working on a live project.

General lessons

• Scale Makes a huge difference
• How many users are going to use the software?
• How much data will be processed?
• What are the expected response times for a function?

These are questions that we, as college students, hardly think about. Our college projects were usually short-sighted. In real-world projects though, the above questions fundamentally affect decisions about hardware, technologies/tools to be used, system architecture, algorithms, and so on.