Denver Dev Blog » Programming

Git Filter-Branch Examples

Matthew McCullough — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 23:55:41 +0000

Have you ever looked at the powerful git filter-branch command? It offers, amongst many features, the ability to maintain history while re-writing the tree to a subset of its past self. A common use case is to prune out a large and unnecessary folder of binaries that was never intended to be under version control.

The filter-branch command can be very confusing at first. What’s needed is a set of working examples. I’ve got 5 scripted flows to show you how to use it. Just hop over to my ever-growing git workbook that I use for workshops and look for module #27 as PDF or as HTML. There’s a corresponding set of samples in the example-repos directory.

If you are interested in more of these type of advanced moves with Git, stay tuned for my upcoming O’Reilly Git Master Class videos (directly O’Reilly link soon), monthly Git trainings via GitHub.com, No Fluff Just Stuff tour stops, or one of my international conferences hosting my Git talks.

The Fall Conference Tour

Matthew McCullough — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 03:02:07 +0000

In the last two months I’ve had the privilege of presenting at and attending six different technology events. They’ve been so fun and diverse that a quick recap is in order.

No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium in Atlanta

This was my first time presenting at an NFJS event in Atlanta, and you can be certain I’ll be back. Earlier in the Summer, I had the opportunity to address the Atlanta Java Users Group (AJUG) and show off the flexibility of Git. For the NFJS Symposium, I talked about Hadoop, Git, Encryption on the JVM and Open Source Debugging, which are my “fun but informative talks” lineup for 2010.

Colorado Springs Open Source User Group

Gary Hessler runs a great user group in Denver’s sister city to the south. I had the opportunity to present Git, one of my favorite topics since it is accessible no matter what language you program in and what platform you use. My NFJS colleague, Tim Berglund presented his always well-received Decision Making talk. It is an interesting divergence from the typical programmer presentation and gives you techniques to deal with team dynamics.

JavaZone in Norway

The ever-excellent JavaBin User Group in Norway put on a stellar conference called JavaZone for 2000+ people. What a show! The diversity of talk formats, speakers, and topics is simply incredible. After the conference, about 25 of us experienced a once-in-a-lifetime event of hiking in the Norwegian countryside. The otherworldly photos and hike details will make you want to attend next year!

The sessions are recorded at JavaZone and two of mine are available online. The former was in the big room in a formal setting. The latter talk was in a smaller room at the end of the conference and had a more informal feel where questions could be asked of the audience and vice-versa.
Encryption Boot Camp on the JVM

Hadoop: Divide and Conquer Gigantic Datasets

StrangeLoop in St. Louis Missouri

After returning from JavaZone, I headed to Missouri for the super-technical event named StrangeLoop brewed by Alex Miller. The lineup of speakers was stellar and the non-profit atmosphere was very relaxing. Hilary Mason, Guy Steele, Yehuda Katz, Josh Bloch, Doug Crockford, and many others. I will be attending next year if the timing works out again.

No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium in Minneapolis

My home base of conferences, NFJS, brought me up to the always warm audiences of Minneapolis. This has to be one of my top-5 favorite stops on the tour due to the beautiful hotel and the technologically advanced attendees. Their questions are deep and I try to be as prepared as possible for them. I had the privilege of Brian Sletten and David Hussman sitting in my classes about Hadoop.

SpringOne

The sprint of conferences concluded with my attendance and helping out with the logistics of SpringOne2GX in Chicago. The hotel was spectacular and the attendance overwhelming. It seemed to be just shy of a 1000 people and double last year’s attendance. I attended some great sessions and had hallway chats with the likes of Hamlet D`Arcy, Hans Dockter, Paul King, Andres Almiray (our co-incidence rate at conferences is getting to be uncanny!), Peter Bell, and Chris Beams. I’ll try to put in some abstracts for next year and get invited to speak!

DevonThink for Managing Information Capture

Matthew McCullough — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:01:37 +0000

As part of my job, I need to capture and reference a lot of information from a lot of sources. DevonThink is one of the tools that helps me do that efficiently. This quick video showcases just 5% of what I use DevonThink for and focuses specifically capturing data from web pages and various RSS feeds, such as Delicious Bookmarks, Twitter, and ReadItLater.

JavaZone 2010, Norway

Matthew McCullough — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:44:53 +0000

I had the privilege of presenting three talks at the massive JavaZone in Norway this year. What an amazing conference; and to think it is all run by a Java Users Group (JUG) called JavaBin.

My slides are online for:

The feedback and comments from Sigmund and Morten were wonderful. I loved getting to say hello to folks I met last year, such as Erik Mogensen. It’s like extended family here.

I hope I get invited back next year. Now, I’m off to do a hike with the organizers in the mountains of Norway!

Presenting at the Raleigh-Durham No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium

Matthew McCullough — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:10:19 +0000

North Carolina

This week, I made a four day journey to the very forested state of North Carolina. Joey knew a Coloradoan was coming and turned on the statewide AC to bring it down to a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit when I landed. The food was great, the people were super, and the technology was awesome.

Relevance

I had an open invitation to come out and visit the team at Relevance, which I’d been waiting to cash in. The Research Triangle NFJS Symposium finally made that visit possible.

I had a great time meeting the entire Relevance team, working with Stu Halloway on automating the Clojure release scripts through some Bash scripting, Git calls and Maven Ant Tasks.

At lunch, I gave a live demo of my workflow with the DevonThink Pro product, including capturing and aggregating multiple RSS streams alongside archived emails and snippets from web pages.

In the afternoon, I had the fun assignment of working with Aaron Bedra on an implementation of JCE symmetric AES encryption on a Clojure project. He followed up a day later on “Relevance Open Source Friday” by beginning to move the implementations over to a standard library for upcoming public consumption.

No Fluff, Just Stuff

I had the pleasure of presenting Encryption, Open Source Debugging on the JVM (over 50 deliveries of that one now), Hadoop, Maven 3 and Git to the engaged audience in Raleigh on Friday and Saturday. The during-presentation questions were spot on, and even when the topics got heady, the students just leaned forward in their chairs and kept on making insightful inquiries. Attendees of that nature are pure candy to a passionate presenter like myself. I especially want to thank Darin Pope, Billy Dupre, David Bloom, David Deininger, Sri Sankaran, Asif Rashid, and Ed Savage for providing much-desired feedback on Twitter.

I know I’ll be back for the NFJS show next year, but I’ll make all efforts to put in a few more visits prior to that. A city with a technology culture of this strength demands that I do. Thanks for having me and perhaps I’ll see some of you at the Rich Web Experience in December on the beaches of sunny Florida.

Resources

For the folks that attended my talks this weekend, here are some constantly updated supplemental materials to resources that are paired with the slides:

Encryption

Open Source Debugging

Hadoop

Maven 3

Git

Rich Web Experience – Florida in December

Matthew McCullough — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:47:22 +0000

I’m excited to be presenting at the Rich Web Experience this December. It’ll be a great show, but the venue location simply adds to the magnetism. Who can resist beaches and Florida in December?

I’ll be doing a sharpened version of my iOS workshop with Ben Ellingson. Attendance numbers will be greatly limited compared to our last time we ran this workshop so as to give plenty of one-on-one attention to students. We’ll get to use the latest iOS 4 SDK with its polished UI, developer-helpful features and Git integration. I hope you’ll consider joining us for this special one-day addition to the conference. Ben and I will be tempted to run the workshop on the beach.

I’ll also be doing a Git workshop in the main portion of the show. If you haven’t already heard, Git (and GitHub) is the hot new open source source code control tool that is agnostic to your programming language of choice but adds features driven by developer needs, not by marketing teams. Bring your notebook, see what the buzz is about, and walk away with a Monday-morning-equipped set of skills to apply Git on your next project.

See you on the beach!

Git at the Atlanta JUG

Matthew McCullough — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:12:53 +0000

Today, I’m excited to be presenting Git (my current favorite topic) to the Atlanta JUG (AJUG) on behalf of the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series. Gunnar Hillert has been most welcoming, and Pratik Patel has been a great promoter of the talk. Thank you both.

In about 75 minutes, I’ll explain why the Git Version Control System deserves your attention as your next version control system. I’ll show you its blazing speed adding 5000 files to a repo, creating a repository at GitHub, initiating a local branch, merging with a colleague’s repository, and finding which commit broke the integration tests.

I’ve also set up a few resources for attendees to peruse after the talk, including:

In short, if you have the least bit of dissatisfaction with your existing version control system, this talk should tip you squarely in favor of the new world of Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS), and specifically, my favorite implementation, Git.

Encryption on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM): Necessary and Easy

Matthew McCullough — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 20:59:53 +0000

The Bad News of Data Breaches

The news keeps pouring in day after day and week after week of significant company-damaging data breaches. No wonder; Only 23% of companies surveyed in a recent poll indicated that data encryption was even a priority. We should not be having, reading about and reacting to most of these. Such events are typically quite preventable. The JVM platform has some of the strongest and simplest support for encryption of any programming language. An easy to use Java API for encryption, as well as several high level open source libraries, are at developers’ beck and call. I’ve embarked on a mission this year to educate as many developers as possible about the basic vocabulary of encryption, the history of how these algorithms and techniques came about, and how to effectively implement the right use of encryption for business applications.

The Solution in the form of Education

I first brought this topic of Encryption on the JVM to user groups in my home town of Denver, Colorado, USA. It received a more than warm welcome and deep after-talk discussions. Next, I took this topic on the road with the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium series in the USA. Next, I’m excited to get to share these same concepts with audiences in Sweden at the always-cutting-edge Øredev conference, shortly followed by the equally esteemed Devoxx in Belgium.

Acting on the Need for Encryption

Discard the notion that encryption is too hard to learn. Embrace that encryption is quickly becoming a necessary skill of sought-after developers, the world over. This talk will get you up to speed and send you on your way to making your applications more secure, leverage encryption properly, and protect your valuable customer data from prying eyes. No longer just a notable stretch goal, this is the new responsible level of application engineering. I hope to see you at one of these exciting events!

IBM Podcast: Andy Glover interviews Matthew McCullough about Git

Matthew McCullough — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:37:05 +0000

Andy Glover recently interviewed me for his new series of IBM podcasts. I was able to share about 20 minutes of my experience with and passion for the Git version control system with his audience. It was an exciting opportunity. Thanks Andy!

Give it a listen and tell me what you think. But more importantly, give Git a try! I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Presenting at No Fluff Just Stuff, Des Moines

Matthew McCullough — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:18:37 +0000

I love the NFJS stop in Des Moines. It competes for the title of “Friendliest” stop on the NFJS tour. It also has a plethora of smart, energetic folks looking to remain on the cutting edge.

To make it efficient for the attendees of my sessions to get to the resources of my talks, I’m listing them all in this blog post.