In this week’s we’ll explore my experience implementing Github commands and workflows that we read about in Pro Git. I’ll also discuss an inspiring article that I read about a beginners journey through open source and lastly I’ll discuss my blog editing activity to sum up this week in open source .

GitHub Activity

The Github activity we emulated in class turned out to be a challenging but useful experience for me. There were two main issues that I had to combat to finally make it through the activity. My initial issue had to do with modifying the name of the committer for the activity. I do not own the local machine I used to commit the files. I hit a snag trying to commit under my username as opposed to the name that is associated with local machine I was using. This issue proved to be a learning moment. I learned that I had to use the “git config —global user.name” and “git config —global user.email” commands to resolve the issue after class. Unfortunately, this is were the second issue arose. I could not configure my username and email during class I ran out of time which slowed down progress for my team. I did not have time to finish the assignment which resulted in the team repository having no issues. I did not have any merge conflicts and thus needed no resolution.This activity was not confusing , though hitting that snag early set me and my whole team back a couple of days. This activity was extremely useful,though I didn’t finish in time I learned how to resolve an issue I had never encountered before.

Reading- A Beginner‘s Very Bumpy Journey Through The World of Open Source

I truly enjoyed the reading for this week. I was particularly drawn to the “A Beginner’s Very Bumpy Journey Through The World of Open Source”. I love how relatable and encouraging the article was. I can identify with the reader and their trials and tribulations as a beginner. I too have had some not-so-nice interactions with a handful of senior developers and that can feel so intimidating and discouraging. I also took note of the author’s process to begin their contributions, the way they started slow with contributing to documentation typos and fixing trivial bugs. This is the level where I feel comfortable starting with. If you recall in my second blog post I mentioned that I wanted these same contributions the author makes initially.The author’s search for a mentor inspired me to seek a mentorship.Having mentor to introduce simple debugging methods or how to write a proper test case like the author mentions can drastically aid in the growth a junior developer. I headed his advice about research the topic you have question on before posting a question to the discussion forum.The author leaves us with three simple but effective tips to getting started with open source :

• Tip #1: Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
• Tip #2: It’s OK to have holes in your knowledge.
• Tip #3: Just start

My take away is not be afraid to look stupid now, with respect to asking questions, if it will lead me to looking less stupid in the future and build on my knowledge. This way I can be helpful to those who may come after me.

Blog Editing Activity

In the blog editing I began by navigating through several classmates weekly repositories . After landing on the first mistake I saw, I opened the post in the person’s Github repository.I open the tab labeled issue and click the green new issue button. I suggested that my classmate enlarge the text in every section to make the blog more visually pleasing. I copy pasted the text that I wanted to suggest changes to, made those changes and submitted the issue.This procedure was simpler and more direct than the workflow we navigated through during class.I didn’t have to fork the person’s repository over I made a stylistic suggestion they could choose to use. That turn out be easier to that making a pull request to see if the person would accept my changes.

Summary of Course-related activity:

1. We had an introduction to version control systems and Git
2. We addressed questions such as:
   • What is a version control system?
   • What is Git?
   • What is GitHub and how is it different from Git?
   • How can you work in Git on your local machine and synchronize your work with copies of it elsewhere, such as on GitHub?
3. Collaborated on a Shared Project
4. Collaborated on Remote Projects

Final Words

Overall I’m staring to feel more comfortable with Github and contibuting to projects. Reading about the experience of others and has grounded me. I’m beginning to understand that the learning process will require some patience and lots of mistakes.