Stop Treating Git as Your Unwanted Bookkeeping Software

A common misconception from people who are new to Git is that it's onerous and interrupts your development flow – when in fact it was designed to do the opposite! For anyone serious about their software profession, this skewed point of view needs to change; you need to stop treating Git as your unwanted bookkeeping software!

Treating Git as your unwanted bookkeeping software is like buying a Ferrari and driving it like a Fiat!

In this post I'll highlight the true business value that can be generated using Git in a more professional manner. I'd even argue that leveraging Git properly can virtually transfer yourself from your company's cost center to its profit center, similarly to how Patrick McKenzie's advice to "Don't call yourself a programmer" does, ultimately earning yourself a spot in the limelight!

I'm not gonna debate whether Git should be used over other alternatives, since it has in recent years become the de facto industry standard. Just look at the results from the latest (2021) Stack Overflow survey, stating that over 90% of respondents use Git on a daily basis.

Alright, let's look at what true business value you're able to create through Git! 🤑

What business value is Git creating?

There are numerous books, threads, and posts (including many of mine) focusing on the hows and whats of Git, but very little on the whys. After all, Git is just a tool like any other – such as a pen, typewriter, or document editor. They themselves don't have any inherent business value (unless your core business is selling them), it's all about how to best leverage the outcome of the underlying work being done using them.

With that said, why is it important to become proficient using Git from a business perspective? Just like any business operation, you're probably part of a unit responsible to either increase revenue or reduce costs (directly or indirectly), so let's look at Git from these two perspectives.

Increase revenue

With proper Git usage you can increase revenue by:

• Improving your personal productivity, after all, in its smallest perspective, Git is "undo on steroids" tailored for source code management – utilizing this can positively impact your development skills similar to learning TDD (or any other software development process)
• Keeping parallel development streams running, integrating source code changes in a controlled an predictable manner – speeding up development efforts within your entire team, while limiting potential production issues
• Conducting rapid releases with iterative and incremental improvements - providing customers with new features in a timely manner (crucial for any businesses these days, take a look at the chart below)

While Git alone won't allow you and your company to make 23k deployments per day, like Amazon does, it all starts with proper source code management!

Reduce costs

With proper Git usage you can reduce costs by:

• Improving overall source code stability, as software is built ground up, over time, piece by piece – speeding up development efforts within your entire team, while limiting potential production issues
• Quickly identifying and fix root cause issues of bugs that has snuck into production – keeping live production issues to a minimum (in 2018 a 14 hours Facebook outage allegedly cost them around ~$90M in lost revenue) 🤯
• Limiting regression bugs by knowing exactly what code changes goes into each release, no unexpected features released to production – increasing customer happiness and reduces churn (particularly important in B2C software)

Imagine being the one figuring out the root cause for a critical production issue causing your company tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, each minute that passes! 💸 Or even better, being the one preventing it from inevitably happening.

Conclusion

By now you should hopefully feel motivated to deepen your Git knowledge, knowing that properly managed it can provide true business value – indirectly elevating yourself into your company's profit center. Instead of treating Git as your unwanted bookkeeping software, realize it was built to improve your software development skills through proper source code management.

It's time to rip the Fiat-coating off your Ferrari, and start leveraging Git's full potential! 🏎️

Not sure where to start? Checkout below post, on one of Git's core concepts, to get your bearings.

Immutable Snapshots – One of Git’s Core Concepts 🚀

One of Git’s core concepts, that’s easily overlooked and sometimes misunderstood, is the fact that all commits are immutable snapshots of the entire project! In this post I’ll illustrate what this really means.

The Pragmatic GitAlexis Määttä Vinkler

😎  Thanks for reading and good luck improving your source code management skills!