Git With It

2 March 2026 - 09:00-13:00

Information Commons - Computer Room 3 (3.02)

RSE Team

All of our events may be recorded and shared via the University of Sheffield Kaltura platform so those who cannot attend may still benefit. We will consider your attendance implicit consent to this.

This course aims to help you develop a deeper understanding of how Git works to facilitate collaboration. It builds on foundational Git courses such as Software Carpentry: Git Novice and Git and GitHub through GitKraken : From Zero to Hero! (available in this training program too).

The core idea around the course is that by improving your understanding of working with branches and how to make your commits tidier and neater it makes it easier to understand pull requests and Git history which in turn makes it easier to collaborate and work on code with others (including your future self!).

The course is split into six episodes. The first introduces how to customise the configuration of your Git repository and how to make informative and atomic commits which makes the history easier to read and understand. Once the concepts of clean history are complete the material moves on to discuss branches, how to switch between branches, moving around the history of a branch, correcting commits made to the wrong branch and stashing work in progress. This foundation of how branches work is the basis of the next episode which shows how to deal with diverging branches. The concept of Git hooks are then introduced along with the Pre-Commit framework. Finally examples of how to leverage Continuous Integration in your workflow are introduced.

This event is for University of Sheffield researchers and research students only.

Prerequisite skills: Participants will be expected to know the basics of Git and familiarity with GitHub. This includes how to create branches, make commits, create pull requests. A good foundational course would be the Git, GitHub and GitKraken : From Zero to Hero course.

Learning Objectives

After completing this course, participants should be able to:

• Make atomic commits of related pieces of work that facilitate a clean history.
• Have a deeper understanding of Git’s references and how they form branches.
• Be comfortable switching branches, moving to commits in the history of a branch and undoing changes.
• Understand how branches diverge and how to update diverged branches.
• Have a working knowledge of Git Hooks.
• Have a working knowledge of pre-commit.
• Use pre-commit in their Continuous Integration.

This course will be run in-person.

We are delighted to be able to make free at point of use training available to the research community, to enable better software and more open, reproducible research. However, free at point of use training is not free. The cost of a course can easily run to thousands of pounds, if preparation costs are taken into account.

If you sign up for a course, please make sure you either attend or cancel your booking. Bookings can usually be managed using myDevelopment or, failing that, by emailing rse@sheffield.ac.uk.

Running courses that are not fully attended wastes our funding (which is provided by taxpayers, charities and students, amongst others) and reduces our collective capacity to improve research outputs and researcher experiences.

Persistent failure to attend booked courses might result in you being excluded from future training opportunities.

More details and registration via myDevelopment.

Course material: https://fair2-for-research-software.github.io/git-with-it/