As a developer, optimizing your version control workflow is one of most valuable productivity improvements you can make. It is one of the most frequently used pieces of software used during your work day (second only to your IDE), and incremental gains have huge long term pay off.

I have developed custom git extensions and workflows for a long time, and it is amazing to see how much the gitx project has evolved with literally years of refinements. At it’s heart, the gitx project offers a set of utility git scripts (packaged within the git namespace) to simplify and optimize common workflows such as:

• starting a new feature branch with latest version of master updating a
• feature branch with the latest code that has been released to master
• integrating a feature branch into a staging environment releasing a feature
• branch to master

Having these workflows packaged into single commands is a huge help for your entire team to just “do the right thing” with no guesswork or opportunities for error (ex: “I forgot to pull latest master before I started my feature branch and now the merge conflicts are killing me!”😎)

The gitx project is optimized for continuous delivery workflows used within many development teams, but it is flexible enough to support alternative workflows as well (ex: iOS/Android projects, rubygems, etc). It also offers tight integration with Github including auto creating pull request and autolinking issues from commits.

And here’s a simple scenario to help get an idea of what the workflow may look like:

$ git start fix-all-the-things
$ # fix all the things and commit them to git as normal
$ git integrate staging && echo "Integrate into staging environment for QA"
$ git release && echo "Merge changes into master!"

Git moving and build something awesome!