Important Aspects of using GitLive

I’m Sunny, and I’m a junior developer at GitLive. Since we are making a tool by developers, for developers, I wanted to share how I use our own product on a day to day basis.

Visibility

As an annoying and (relatively) useless junior developer, I have a lot of questions. Since we work in a fully remote team, picking my moments is both important and hard to do. GitLive helps me a lot with this. It shows me when people are online and what they’re working on. So ideally, I wait till someone’s online, working on the same repository I’m working on and on a similar issue… and then I ask away.

It's worth mentioning that in the future, messaging will be available within the GitLive window, so the context switching between instant messaging apps and code IDEs will also be eliminated.

Both working on the firebase repository. Bingo!

Cherry Picking

Sometimes I need uncommitted code from a teammate. With GitLive, I don’t even have to ask or disturb anyone. I just use our cherry picking feature to see the changes they’ve made and take whatever I need.

Thanks for this big chunk of code Fred.

Pair Programming

GitLive’s most useful feature for me, personally, is the collaborate feature I’m trying to learn more about TypeScript. Pair programming with someone more experienced is a great way to do this. But pair programming remotely is a challenge… or at least it used to be. With GitLive, I can collaborate with one click, and no one has to begin a slack call and start screen sharing.

The convenience means that others don’t mind starting a quick collaboration session. It’s often easier than a long explanation, for both parties. In future releases, audio calls will be added to GitLive, so everything can be done within the IDE if necessary. Fred and Michael will soon be able to hear my lovely voice without even having to leave VS Code.

How pair programming feels for the less experienced person.

Privacy

Have you ever been so embarrassed by the code you’re writing to solve a problem that you don’t want your colleagues to see? Me too. Luckily GitLive has a setting for this, so I can hide my working copy changes just in case.

Also, if you’re working on something important and don’t want to be disturbed, you can appear offline, or hide your activity graph from view. I’m usually the one bothering people, not the one being bothered, so this is not a problem I have myself, but a useful feature for some of you nonetheless (maybe for you Michael).

I don't have a good caption for this one. Please enjoy this screenshot

Conclusion

If you’re a tech lead reading this (ambitious I know – but one can dream) and you’re on the fence about whether to use GitLive, at least give it a try. From my experience, having a communication tool specific to developers makes the life of your team members (especially the juniors) much easier.

Previously published at https://blog.git.live/how-we-use-GitLive-A-junior-developer's-perspective