Contributing and Practicing Git

Using Git on Terminal

On Monday, we had our second remote class, where we were taken to breakout rooms and were completing an activity to practice our skills with GitHub. As Professor Klukowska introduced to us how to rebase our branches the week before spring break, we have the chance to actually do it ourselves on Monday. The process was actually harder than I have imagined, since I have very little experience with GitHub before.

Command Lines

Creating the repository was a bit challenging on terminal. My group mates helped me with first “mkdir” a folder and then change path, “cd” to the folder I just created. Then, I had to use “git init” to tell git that the folder is a repository. I was not that familiar with the commands on terminal for Git Hub, so my group mates are indeed a lot of help to me. Then, to create files, I learned that there are two ways to do so. I first experimented with the command “touch …” which just creates an empty file in the current directory. This does not apply to our situation, since there should be content in each file to distinguish the ones that are updated and the ones that are not updated. I tried a second method suggested by my teammates, which uses “echo” and an arrow that points to a file. This method actually allows us to write into a certain file, which satisfied our need, so we chose this command instead.

Git Log

After we add files to different branches and updated them, we ere supposed to print out the logs of our repository. We found a specific questions that we could not figure out ourselves, there are indentations in the displayed log of the master branch. We were confused by the way this is displayed, so we asked Professor Klukowska for an answer, and she explains it very clearly — the indentation were showing a different branch, as we are displaying the log in a graphic way. The slashes and the stars actually marks the different branches there are. After the explanation provided by professor Klukowska, the log suddenly made much more sense to use.

Working on Gatsby

During the meeting on Thursday, Professor Klukowska suggested that we reach out to the development team of Gatsby, which is our selected project. After the meeting, we briefly gathered our opinions and decided to send a email to the head of the development team. Eric is writing to introduce ourselves, as undergrads at NYU. We also mention that we are taking an open source development course, and would like to contribute in any way possible. We set a goal to make our first contribution on a easy or medium issue within the first two week, and we are now actively looking for issues to work on.