DEV Community

Cover image for Got Myself into a Pickle Last Week!
Alex Morton
Alex Morton

Posted on • Updated on

Got Myself into a Pickle Last Week!

This post was originally published on March 15, 2021 on my blog.


I got myself into a pickle last week at work!! It was one of those "you have to make the mistake to learn from it" kind of realizations, and it's because I'd bitten off much more than I could chew when it came to the number of PRs I had open at a given time.

The work I've been working on recently involves implementing a new design that was created for the emails the app sends to users on any given event (i.e. confirm account or forgot password, among other things) and I was working on about three different ones.

However, my mistake was starting new PRs when I still had another one that wasn't merged yet. Because the thing is, when you have multiple works in progress, you don't realize how much the production code is changing each day with new code being merged from other teammates.

So the moment you go to work on one project or PR, you realize that the code you started writing has maybe been completely changed and then you run into all sorts of merge conflicts.

Thankfully, it's gotten me better at not being as intimidated of conflicts (because let me tell ya - I was scared of those before!), and it's definitely become easier to navigate them on my own and actually now what I'm doing and what's going on.

With the help of a teammate last week, I was able to unravel myself from the fiasco I'd created (where I just didn't know where one file started and another one ended!) and by the sheer grace of God (and Git!), I was able to get my head above water again.

This week, I'll be focusing on only one thing at a time - especially since it's going to be a pretty eventful week.

Yay for making mistakes and learning from them and ultimately becoming better than we were yesterday!


Pssst! I send weekly newsletters about the self-taught coding journey and my own coding adventures (and misadventures!) Sign up here! >>

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
emma profile image
Emma Goto πŸ™

Nice! Ill admit I'm still not a merge conflict expert - sometimes I'll open up the code repo in the browser and work it out via seeing the latest commit history πŸ˜