Adam Retter

adam@evolvedbinary.com
 

State of the Art in Healthcare
@ St Edmund Hall, Oxford
2025-04-03

@adamretter

• Director of Evolved Binary

  • UK - Software, Consultancy, Training, and R&D

• Co-founder and Co-owner of eXist Solutions

  • Germany - TEI Publisher software

• Software Engineer / Prolific Open Source contributor

  • eXist-db - 20 Years as Core contributor (last 9 as Main dev.)

  • RocksDB - 7 Years as RocksJava main developer

• W3C XQuery Working Group - Invited expert

• Founder of EXQuery, and creator of RESTXQ

• Enjoys Research and Development, and Snowboarding

• Distributed Version Control System

• Open Source software (GPL 2.0)

  • Download from - https://git-scm.com

• A set of tools that run from the command line

• A protocol for sending/receiving changes - email / HTTP

• Used in the development of most modern software

• You want to keep your source code somwhere safe

  • Works best with text based files

  • Doesn't have to be source code, e.g. Documentation

• You want to keep a history of changes

• You want to tag significant milestones

  • e.g. a new release version

• You want to collaborate with others

• You want to have a standard workflow for changing source code

• Initially - Just a folder on your computer

  • With hidden folders/files containing metadata

• Git is distributed

  • You can "pull" pull changes into your local copy

  • You can "push" changes from your local copy

• You have a complete copy on your machine

• Anyone else can also have a complete copy on their machine

• You can also have copies on servers on the Web - e.g. GitHub.com

• These are called "repositories"

  • Normal to have one per project

• A set of changes are known as a "commit"

  • Has an identifier (commit hash)

  • Has an author

  • Has an date

  • Has an user provided message/description

• A branch has a name, and is:

  • An alternative timeline

  • Branched from an existing branch

  • A git repository starts with 1 default branch

    • Typically called: "main"

  • Branches can be merged back together

• You can create as many as you like

• Usual uses:

  • Developing a new feature

  • Fixing a bug

  • Experimentation

  • Making a distrubtive change

Time

main

feature/new-thing

bugfix/some-thing

• You can "tag" a commit

  • Has a name

  • Has an author

  • Has an date

  • Has an user provided message/description

• Can be used to identify/label releases

• When looking at a tag, you can see:

  • The tag details (name, author, description, signature, etc.)

  • The commit

  • The entire history leading to that commit

• Is not Git

  • It is Git plus a website, APIs, and Workflow

  • Just another git remote repository!

• One of the most significant developments in Software Engineering

• Easy to use and get started

  • Download: GitHub Desktop - https://desktop.github.com

• Easy to collaborate

• Alternatives

  • GitLab - https://gitlab.org

  • BitBucket - https://bitbucket.org

  • Sir Hat - https://sr.ht

https://github.com