ᴀ ʙᴇᴛᴛᴇʀ ᴡᴀʏ ᴛᴏ ꜱᴀᴠᴇ ᴅᴇᴠᴇʟᴏᴘᴇʀ’ꜱ ʟɪꜰᴇ

Your world’s on fire, crashing down!! Who do you call?

SUPERMAN or BATMAN?

Is it THE SUPERMAN? I most probably would!!!

But, what about BATMAN !!! Mmm Well, I think I like him too….

LET ME TELL YOU A STORY, MY STORY OF BEING A DEVELOPER!!!!

The 9-5 developer, my life is full of challenges, especially waking up at 8 o’clock in the morning. Jokes apart, the major one is when it comes to my code. I do write a couple of hundreds of lines of effective code each day. I need someone to keep track of every change going on to my source code over time, help me turn back the clock whenever I make a blunder, and someone to help me collate the previous code which can help me fix the mistake while minimizing disruption to all my team members. Overall I need SUPERMAN or BATMAN in my life.

So I started my journey of finding the real heroes and guess what I found- a dozen of them: such as SpiderMan, IronMan, CaptainAmerica, etc. Since I love DC, I continued my journey of finding my Superheroes.

My first turnpike was The VERSION CONTROL SYSTEM(VCS) - I pretty much found every solution to all my problems.

VCS helped me not only to solve the problem of tracking individual change by each of our team members and help prevent parallel work from conflicting but also to manage the past versions of my code.

There are other benefits as well that I realized:

• It worked for every platform, rather than around what operating system or tool our team members must use.

• It helped my team keeps multiple flows of work independent from each other also known as Branching.

• It helped our team to move faster and allowed us to preserve efficiency and agility as the team scales to include more developers.

While my search for SUPERMAN and BATMAN was still in progress, I found some other superheroes (let’s call them MARVEL heroes) such as:

• BitBucket

• SVN

• Mercurial

• Apache Subversion etc etc

All of them let you version control thus, allowing you to hold the power to review, track and manage the code at a certain level.

My expedition finally took me to my SUPERHEROES and guess what I asked them for- an Autograph!!! Just Kidding.

My true SuperHeroes are GitHub and AWS CodeCommit. It’s a time for SUPERMAN(GitHub) vs BATMAN(AWS CodeCommit).

Let me take you to my own version of 2016’s movie- BATMAN v SUPERMAN - Dawn of Justice:

GitHub- The house of more than 40 million software developers ranging from open source to business. Everyone’s favorite for the choice of host, review, manage and build software. They even market themselves with a movie poster which says - The world's leading software development platform. Exactly like how SUPERMAN is the world’s leading superhero (ok now I am biased!).

More than 2.1 million businesses and organizations use GitHub

AWS CodeCommit: - Fully Managed place for all lazy cloud enthusiasts people, it takes away all hurdles of security and scalability with a highly developed AWS ecosystem. Let me tell you a secret- you can do all these things while continuing to use existing git tools. AWS CodeCommit is fully equipped with technologies just like BATMAN.

Well, that’s not the end of the movie - I excavated more into their superpowers to know more about how they can help me and my team in exactly the same way how superheroes saved thousands and thousands of civilians in their movies.

Evidently, I realized that under the hood Batman is well-grounded with technologies whereas Superman has the natural power to fight against the bad.

If my superheroes could speak, I think this is how their tinder account would look like:

SUPERMAN - GitHub:

As a natural, GitHub showcases its heroic performance with simplicity

• Practically every open-source project uses GitHub to manage its project.

• Well-written documentation is the one key to success you got every help section and guide have articles for nearly any topic related to git that you can think of.

• The Attraction for most of the recruiter’s as it also works to showcase your talent.

BATMAN - AWS CodeCommit

Being fully equipped with the latest cloud moves it showcase all sophisticated facets.

• AWS CodeCommit eliminates the need to host, maintain, back up, and scale your own source control servers.

• AWS CodeCommit automatically encrypts your files in transit and at rest.

• AWS CodeCommit has a highly scalable, redundant, and durable architecture.

But sometimes being SuperHeroes is not so easy. They fear losing their fan following; exactly what I found to be true for Github & CodeCommit. And why wouldn’t they be? If their spouses could rant with their therapists, here’s what that transcript would look like:

SUPERMAN - GitHub:

Github being the most popular among all has some potential lacks

• GitHub does offer private repositories, but this isn’t necessarily perfect for many.

• It costs to have a versioning repository on GitHub, however, it is worth the investment if you’re working professionally.

• There is no built-in access control and doesn’t support binary files.

Update: GitHub now offers unlimited private repositories on its free tier! — Highlight

BATMAN - AWS CodeCommit:

CodeCommit so far, in the market of cloud computing, has introduced few challenges among the developers:

• It fails to do direct communication with some of the tools.

• CodeCommit could also benefit from improved documentation and a more user-friendly interface.

• Bit of overhead on encrypting data on rest.

So if you ask me again, my developer world is crashing down- who do I call? Well considering dozens of facts in both, I would love to see AWS CodeCommit more improved as it would be a great opportunity for the industries to use it in their own ecosystem.

Speaking out as a fan of both it’s always good to understand the nature and reason to utilize them at the right time and have good control over the code over a period of time.

As a developer get insights on which one would help you in the best possible way, Because it is definitely worth a few dollars on tickets and popcorn to watch their superpowers in action.

About Author Riyaz Ul Haque

Senior Software Engineer | AWS Community Builder