How we use GitLive: A junior developer's perspective

Im Sunny, and Im 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 theyre working on. So ideally, I wait till someones online, working on the same repository Im working on and on a similar issue and then I ask away.

Both working on the firebase repository. Bingo!	Look at that quick response time from Michael.

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.

Cherry Picking

Sometimes I need uncommitted code from a teammate. With GitLive, I dont even have to ask or disturb anyone. I just use our cherry picking feature to see the changes theyve made and take whatever I need.

^{Thanks for this big chunk of code Fred!}

Pair Programming

GitLives most useful feature for me, personally, is the collaborate feature Im 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 dont mind starting a quick collaboration session. Its 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 youre writing to solve a problem that you dont 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 youre working on something important and dont want to be disturbed, you can appear offline, or hide your activity graph from view. Im 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 youre a tech lead reading this (ambitious I know but one can dream) and youre 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.