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A comment on What tech stacks are indie hackers using for their apps, and why?. Parent comment

Re:What tech stacks are indie hackers using for their apps, ... by existencebox on Friday July 20, 2018 @09:08PM (#17580190)
When I first started learning how to program, I didn't know git existed. When I eventually learned a year later, I was already well acquainted with sending myself zips by email, and using email as "history". Git was quite scary to me at the time, (merges and reset/revert as I recall) so for a good year or two more I just kept using emails. It certainly wasn't pretty, but it required almost 0 mental cycles, worked without question, and actually gave some really nice features comparatively. (searching for a "commit" using complex queries)

We were eventually forced to use git/hg/svn for some courses over that time, so I became comfortable out of necessity and now vc for anything serious; had to unfortunately even use TFS for a while. (guilty secret, for many toy projects, I absolutely just have a folder on my fileserver and rely on its backup/replication, zipping the folder if I want to "snapshot".)

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Re:What tech stacks are indie hackers using for their apps, ... by i_made_a_booboo on Friday July 20, 2018 @11:30PM (#17580556)
Please don't try to sell the world on working this way. It's just terrible and lazy. You can learn enough git to use it productively in 5 commands. It's not even difficult.
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Re:What tech stacks are indie hackers using for their apps, ... by existencebox on Saturday July 21, 2018 @12:43AM (#17580718)
I think you've entirely misread my post. I was giving a "cute" story concurring with the author that you can manage to be productive with duct tape and spit, and that it can be a learning period when understanding proper tooling, especially if one is coming in without any real oversight or mentorship at first; if you're reading this thread on HN you're probably far more exposed to CS than I was at that point. There's no "selling anyone" on anything.

I would however frankly say that I think the inability to recognize how intimidating git can be to an uninitiated was the _reason_ it took so long for me and many of my classmates; (this was over a decade ago, and I've been using vc professionally the entire interim) certainly far more damaging than anything you accuse me of propagandizing; It was extremely frustrating and dismissive to constantly be told by more experienced programmers that I should feel far more confident than I was about a tool that in hindsight, I don't look askew at myself for finding some aspects of unintuitive, and I'm a constant user now.

And, while I'm on this tirade, if you're addressing "working this way" as a negative to put unimportant toy projects on a heavily replicated and backed up server, I think you and I have different priorities in how we use our time.

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Re:What tech stacks are indie hackers using for their apps, ... by tonyarkles on Friday July 20, 2018 @11:02PM (#17580486)
I really learned to appreciate VC when growing to a team project. Know what's even scarier than SVN or Git merges? Trying to merge zip files...
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Re:What tech stacks are indie hackers using for their apps, ... by fragmede on Friday July 20, 2018 @11:52PM (#17580608)
That's pretty easy. All you have to do is extract the first zip, go into the directory, run `git init; git add -a; git commit -m first` then unzip the second one and run... Hey wait a second.
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Re:What tech stacks are indie hackers using for their apps, ... by danieldk on Saturday July 21, 2018 @08:21AM (#17581754) 

    diff -ruN dir1 dir2
Use your favorite merge tool for changed files (like in git).

(Of course, proper VCS wins any day.)

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