RailsConf 2013 Highlights

Last week, I had the privilege of attending RailsConf up in Portland. With about 1500 attendees, 4 days of sessions, about 3-4 session options to choose from at any time, and a set of about 40 lightning talks, there was

Extra Git Merge Commits: Merge branch 'master' of github.com:owner/repo

As I've been working with some friends on a GitHub-hosted project lately, I've seen tons of seemingly extraneous merge commits in our master branch that look something like this:

Merge branch 'master' of github.com:owner/repo

This can seem confusing, especially to those coming from a subversion paradigm, for a few reasons:

1. You see it when you're working on master. If there's no branching happening, why is there a merge?
2. The merge commit includes changes that have already been committed, so it looks like they're happening twice.

What Causes This?

When you're

A Quick Look at SourceTree for Windows

Atlassian recently released a beta version of SourceTree for Windows, their graphical Git client, which was previously only available on Mac. Since BitBucket kept telling me to give it a try, I gave in and snagged a copy.

Now, I gotta say, the Git CLI is amazing. I mean, you can do some crazy stuff in a simple terminal window. Tasks like interactive rebasing and cherry picking hunks of changes work surprisingly well on the command line. But there are also tons of features of Git that would lend themselves well to a GUI. So let's peek in on SourceTree to see what it provides.