Winner's Excogitations

For the past week, I have been privileged to be at the Andela boot camp LOS XVIII holding at the Andela training facility, Sabo. Prior to this experience, I considered myself a hardcore programmer who had tried ‘all’ the frameworks, used ‘all’ the libraries, used ‘all’ the tools and written ‘all’ the code, but this boot camp has been an eye opener for me. I fancy myself a smart person but the volume of information I’ve had to consume this week has been nothing short of ginormous.

Don’t get me wrong, it has been an awesome experience which has motivated me to be better and be more. So using this humble blog of mine, I intend to chronicle the knowledge I gain during this boot camp in several blog posts.

As is said on numerous radio stations, stay tuned!

In my crash course introduction to Git and all its terminologies and commands, no term was as confusing as the word ‘HEAD’. Different people had apparently differing opinions of what the term meant which didn’t help with my conundrum.

One day and a gazillion webpages later, I have a more holistic understanding of what the HEAD means. I’ll state that the differing opinions mentioned were correct but not complete.

So lets get to it. What is the HEAD?

1. In most cases, the HEAD refers to or points to the latest commit in the current branch that you are working on. For example, if you are on the master branch, the HEAD is the latest commit in the master branch, if you switch to a feature-branch, the HEAD switches to the latest commit in the feature-branch.
2. In other rarer cases, the HEAD refers to or points to a particular commit or tag and is called a detached HEAD.

I hope this was informative.

Cheers!