berziiii
commented
8 years ago Thanks for sharing! The biggest thing to take away is that we will do our best to explain the how, but much of the how needs to be digested on your side. We will provide to tools to get something down but many times, the solution can do derived in many ways so the how many be a preference vs a best practice. Best practices, we will enforce but other than that, no guarantees. Should you want to learn more about the inner makings on why and how something work, feel free to do additional reading to help full fill this need. Regardless, glad to hear Git and terminal are settling in and do not hesitate to touch base should anything become unclear!
Overall Impressions So far, I feel the course is doing a good job of reinforcing good habits. I'm already surprised at how often I'm using the little shortcuts that Chris likes to drive home, and I'm feeling very comfortable on the command line. I also feel like I am getting a good grasp of git and GitHub.
One criticism I would have is that the concepts tend to be discussed in a very singular way rather than as part of a whole. The "how" and "why" seem to be put off until after we've already typed commands into the terminal. I think it would be easier to understand why the git commands are so important if a little more time was spent on why we're using version control in the first place. What is it? Why are we using it? How does it improve the quality of the final product? What happens when it's not used? I think we all could answer these questions at this point, but it probably would've been more clear if Brian's diagram (which was very helpful) had been drawn at the beginning of class.
That being said, I did enjoy the lesson very much. I had heard a lot about git and GitHub prior to coming to the course, I knew I had to learn them at some point, but I never had any idea where to start. It's all very nebulous and intimidating, especially with words like "commit" and "merge" being so prevalent. After one day, I'm already feeling quite comfortable with the common commands that I'll surely be using throughout my career. And while version control isn't the most exciting topic, I felt engaged the large majority of the time. I'm definitely looking forward to future lessons!
How do you learn best? Ideally, I'd like to take the time to struggle through challenging exercises after fairly brief introductions to the concepts. Just being shown the material makes it seem too easy and it doesn't stick, while basic exercises can make it difficult to see the full potential of each concept. However, challenges that use concepts that have never been shown can be frustrating (I think I understand what rebase is, but I would have preferred to hear about it a bit in class before doing exercises with it).
Which resources from this document helped you the most? I did not like the TryGit tutorial, as it literally gave every command needed directly beneath the prompt. It was too easy to fall into auto-pilot and not actually think about what was happening, but it did function as a good review, as it was quite similar to everything we covered in class. I actually really enjoyed the Git Branching Tutorial. I liked the visualizations, which made the commit history much more clear to me. The article was also excellent at showcasing the different ways version control can be implemented.
How comfortable are you with the workflow (series of steps and git commands) we use to share work and responses? 8.5/10. I feel like I have a good understanding of how the local git repositories work and I understand how they interact with GitHub (at least as far as we've been taught in one day). I am interested to hear more about pull requests though. The article mentions that they become "discussions" rather than just proposed changes, and I'd like to know more about that process. Can others test a pull request before it's merged? If they want to edit a pull request, how is that handled? Who "owns" that new code and is ownership important these situations?