A little background: Through my teens in the 90’s I did a lot of the things you may expect. I was a script kiddie on mIRC, made a tank game in Unreal Engine, and did some Quake modding. From 2002-2004 I landed a job doing Java web dev, SQL, and overall database administration because my father’s friend needed someone that could do that. I was ok at the job, but not great. Being young, my hobby that turned into a 9-5 made me want to stab my eyes out and I quit.
With that said, I can understand a lot of what’s going on, but it doesn’t “click” anymore. I spent 20 years as a career machinist, but I physically can’t do that anymore. Here’s the rub - my twin brother is a brittle diabetic and can’t work (lots of other stuff going on as well), and our mother is getting old (father passed this year). The only reasonable way forward that I can see in order to be able to support my brother is trying to get back into development.
When I stopped, subversion was what we used. I’m trying to understand Git, but it’s a giant conceptual leap. I guess, what I’d like to hear from you all is a way to jump back in as quickly as possible in such a way that it may be a career.
Thanks
You likely have a mental model of Subversion, so what I would suggest is to try to forget as much of it as possible first, as Git is very different.
Take a tutorial that is aimed at Git beginners, e.g. [1]. This will help you start building a new mental model as well as get first practical experience.
After that, read the official docs starting wtih the object model[2]. The reason why many people struggle to get into git, especially after using other VCS, is that it was built from the ground up, without much regard of the established conventions and terminology. Linus Torvalds once mentioned that he used his experience designing file systems when developing git.
So the object model of git is very simple, but also not intuitive. However, once you understand it, everything will start making sense, including the xkcd you’ve linked.
[1] https://gitimmersion.com/ [2] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects
You’ve linked into it, but I was just going to point at the Git book: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
It’s an afternoon’s reading; it does an excellent job of giving you the right mental model - and a crib aheet of commands to navigate it.