[Skill-up]: Git skills for new and prospective maintainers

[chendaniely]

Title of the session: Git skills for new and prospective maintainers

Session details

• Session type: skill-up

• Keywords: git, lesson maintainers, first-time maintainers, future maintainers, prospective maintainers

• Permission to record this session: Yes

Abstract

~Part of Carpentries' onboarding is submitting a pull request for a lesson.~ ~One of the goals of this task is to make sure we have all gone through the motions of the collaborative git experience at least once.~ ~For many of us (including myself), this was the first pull request we have ever submitted.~ The current Carpentries git lesson introduces collabration to learners by adding individuals as a collaborator to the repository. However, this type of collaboration workflow does not scale past more than a couple of collaborators before conflicts become unbearable. Depending on when you joined the carpentries, you may be familar with the forking workflow for collaboration to make a change to an existing lesson. but, there is no formal guide to new instructors on how they can learn the skills needed to become a lesson maintainer. As a community of practice, we are always learning, and maintaining our teaching materials need a steady influx of new maintainers to keep our lessons up-to-date. This skill-up is an extension to the current software-carpentry Git lesson for those who are thinking about becoming a lesson maintainer and want to learn about the forking-branching-PR skills needed while maintaining lessons. It also supports current and new maintainers who want a more solid foundation for the commands and workflows they are using while maintaining lessons. The skill-up would cover the forking model of collaboration, how to create and merge branches, how to submit pull requests in this collaboration model, and how to edit and update branches before accepting changes for open source projects.

Personal details

• Name or pseudoname of the session lead: Daniel Chen

• Co-leads' names (we recommend involving 2 helpers/co-leads): None

• Email or other ways to contact the session leads/co-leads: chendaniely@gmail.com

• Country of residence and/or compatible Time Zones (provide options): USA, Eastern Standard Time (EST) or UTC/GMT -5

• Would you like to present this multiple times, in other time zones: I can present in other time zones. I would need to coordinate this with potential attendees.

• Would you like to volunteer to be listed as a wrangler/host for your time zone: Yes

Is there any help you would like to invite from the community? Please provide below in bullet points.

• Always open to topics that should be covered and how to change/tweak what I already planned.

• Other comment: @angela-li is the maintainer lead, would you like to help with content suggestions or co-lead?

[ousodaniel]

@chendaniely thanks for your interest in regional hosting, check out the details here please. We'd love to see you sign up. Best

[tobyhodges]

Love the idea for the session (and would extra-love it if the recording was used to help onboard new maintainers in the future too!) but recommend adjusting the opening sentence of the abstract to reflect the latest Instructor Training checkout requirements: trainees are no longer required to submit a Pull Request for their lesson contribution.

[chendaniely]

Thanks @tobyhodges I just updated the abstract to reflect the new onboarding proess.

[serahkiburu]

Hi @chendaniely, the organising committee reviewed this session proposal and had this to say:

This session's topic will benefit many people in the Carpentries community, especially as a new round of maintainers is being brought on right now. Would this session be open (and useful) to community members who are not maintainers or is there value in a specific focus on lesson maintainers?

We are excited for your session, and more details i.e. around scheduling will be shared with you in the coming days. Let me know if I can answer any questions or clarify anything for the time being.

[chendaniely]

Would this session be open (and useful) to community members who are not maintainers or is there value in a specific focus on lesson maintainers

It would be open to both. For current maintainers, hopefully it'll help them be more comfortable with jumping around branches. For non-maintainers, I'm hoping they pick up enough skills so they can apply to be maintainers in the future.

The only hard pre-requisite is being familiar with the existing SWC git materials. I will pretty much start with the assumption that users are comfortable with add, commit, push, pull on their own repository. I will pretty much go through these steps in the very beginning as a quick review. Since the swc materials also cover conflicts, having seen them before will also be useful, but I will go into more detail with conflicts in the workshop.