lesson_1_reflections.txt

How did viewing a diff between two versions of a file help you see the bug that was introduced?

viewing a diff shows the latest changes you've made, and so where you're likely to have fucked it up
that said, the initial file must be working, otherwise it's all drek

How could having easy access to the entire history of a file make you a more efficient programmer in the long term?

Don't do stupid shit twice
Do good stuff several times

What do you think are the pros and cons of manually choosing when to create a commit, like you do in Git, vs having versions automatically saved, like Google docs does?

Well, obviously you get to choose what gets saved and when, so can make each commit a meaningful differentiated action.
Auto-saving just backs up your work more often so it doesn't get lost, which your IDE should be doing anyway.

Why do you think some version control systems, like Git, allow saving multiple files in one commit, while others, like Google Docs, treat each file separately?

Well, Git is designed for projects - collections of files that work together to do something. A feature implementation might mean changing all of them at once
Docs is for office documents, which tend to be one-offs

How can you use the commands git log and git diff to view the history of files?

git log will show you the commits, authors, their time and date, their ids and headers
diff will take two commit ids and compare them
compare one id to the previous one, and you can see what additions and deletions have been made

How might using version control make you more confident to make changes that could break something?

well, you can always roll them back to a last working version, even if you're unable to figure out what went wrong

Now that you have your workspace set up, what do you want to try using Git for?

tracking commits to a bunch of Twitter bots I wrote in Python