Last week, we learned what rebasing is and the differences between rebasing and merging. I think I understood the high-level concept very well. That being said, trying to apply my knowledge in the real world with an example showed me the opposite of what I thought. During the last week, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to create a commit tree in the way our professor showed us. When I say a lot of time, I mean it. It looked straightforward initially, but three other people in my group and I couldn’t figure out when to create and modify files exactly. We needed to rebase the branch at some point, and figuring out when to rebase exactly was also part of the challenge. These exercises showed me that I shouldn’t be very confident with my knowledge before learning how to apply it. I still need a lot of practice to master how to rebase a branch, but I definitely feel more confident and learned a lot by doing these exercises.

I also want to comment on the group work we had. We had two different groups to do the same task, and the groups I had were drastically different in terms of the group dynamics. In my first group, we communicated a lot, and we made sure that everyone was on the same page. I felt better with my first group because I felt comfortable asking questions if I didn’t get anything. However, this wasn’t the case with my second group. No one was really talking in our group, and it was difficult to ask questions because of the silence. I understand that some people know a lot, but I think communicating this knowledge is a responsibility we have when we do group work. I would definitely prefer to work in a group like my first group.

Group project progress

The last two weeks were definitely stressful for any human being, and it was even more difficult for NYU undergraduates since they evacuated all dorms without prior notice. So, we didn’t have a lot of time to work on our project. During my free time I have, I worked on installing the required development environment. Last time when we tried installing the environment, we all got different errors at different stages of the installation. So, I decided to make a fresh start by installing a fresh Ubuntu to a virtual machine on my computer. I thought this would create fewer errors since there is almost nothing installed in this virtual machine to create an error during the installation. Indeed, my approach did work, and I managed to install the development environment.

Now, we are working on the first issue to contribute to. I can’t say that it is difficult to communicate with my group, but it is not super easy either. I think slack is not a good way to communicate with since we don’t always have it open on our computers. For example, I don’t like keeping it open all the time because it consumes a lot of memory for no reason and causes my computer to slow down. As a result, I don’t always quickly see the messages. I think we should switch to a communication channel that all of use more frequently, like Facebook Messenger. Additionally, we agreed on the time slot to meet with the professor to discuss the project we choose to contribute to. Hopefully, we will quickly choose our first issue for our contribution and start contributing to Jupyter Interactive Notebook.