Part 1: Git

Git is a fascinating technology because you can use it for years and it will always manage to find new ways to make you feel stupid. At its core Git is pretty simple, if you know push pull add, and commit, you can more or less get by, but when you start going under the hood and trying to explain what’s actually going on it gets a lot hazier. I suppose this is the case with almost any piece of technology, but Git always manages to scare me a bit when I start getting in too deep.

One of the most important Git commands that I learned from the demonstration in class was git reset to restore a deleted file in the working directory. Obviously backing up and restoring files is a key function of Git, but I honestly never knew this command previously. I also appreciated that we went into head and navigating commits on the command line, as I have often leaned on GitHub to do that in the past which is bad practice. Overall I enjoyed taking a closer look at Git and what is actually going on when you use it.

Part 2: Presenting First Open Source Project

This was an exciting week as the class got to present our first open source projects of the semester. I was very impressed by a lot of the other groups’ work, many of them went above and beyond creating their own logos and art for their extensions and there were some great ideas that I could see people actually using if they were available on the extension browser for Firefox or Chrome.

As for my own group, I am very happy with how things turned out. We managed to sit down together and work through most of the code (although I came very late because of an interview), and we were able to split up the work evenly and hit our deadline. I mainly worked on the documentation, so my focus was on setting up guidelines and information for contributors as well as creating the readme file and ensuring that it was easy for new users to get started (I am just now noticing that I spelled “installation” as “installatioon” which is unfortunate). Our code of conduct, the laissez faire “No Code of Conduct,” proved to be a bit controversial in the presentation, but I stand by it being solid for most situations that may arise. Extreme circumstances may call for staff interference, but most conflicts can and should be resolved between individuals.