Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Git Commits and HTML Basics

It was the second day of class and the pace of learning accelerated. We are still learning the basics, but even HTML and CSS can be quite involved. Case in point. 

We had two major tasks for the day. I completed one and a half of them.
1. Create a repository on our github account to receive the source code for the card flip website .css file that we made monday. To find the end result of the assignment, visit my GitHub or https://github.com/gemfarmer/card-flip for the source code.

  1. Log into github.com
  2. Name your new repository folder (card-flip for me)
  3. Open terminal
  4. Create a folder called Projects in your home directly (you can access your home directory by typing cd ~)
  5. Create a folder with the same name as your repository folder within your Projects folder.
  6. Copy and paste the code the file you want to upload (commit) to github into the newly created folder
  7. cd into the card-flip directory if you're not there already before following the next step.
  8. Use the following commands to initialize that folder as a local repo and add the github repo as a remote. Adding a remote allows you to use commands like 'pull' and 'push' to keep the code on your computer in sync with the code on github. (These same instructions appear on github.com after creating the repo.)
    Make sure you replace YOUR_GITHUB_ID with your actual github id.
    touch README.md
git init
git add .
git commit -m "first commit"
git remote add origin https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_ID/card-flip.git
git push -u origin master
  9. Navigate to your card-flip repo on github.com (or refresh it if it's already open from a previous step) and verify that it contains the newly added files.
Congratulations! You can now execute git commands from the terminal to interact with a repo on your github account. You can use this technique to submit your homework exercises. Follow these instructions each time you wish to create a new repo for submitting an exercise solution.
2. Create a website that uses basically all of the basic <HTML> tags that you can imagine and styling it with internal stylesheets. This task has been a bear for me because I get the urge to style everything before completing the complete barebones html. When I finish the website tomorrow I will add it to my github repository. It will not be too showy or pretty, but it will have a functional nav bar, tables, lists, and the card-flip functionality that I constructed on monday.
refactoru headquarters

In the afternoon we had a lecture by Clint Nash on adaptation within a fast-moving industry. The lecture focused on the importance of continuous learning, experimentation, curiosity, assertiveness, and the nature of innovation. Learning code is a technical skill, but it can also be a mentality that can be applied cross-industry and permeate every facet of your life.
Clint used the term iterative innovation to describe the incremental changes that ultimately progress and improve society. The tech culture embraces open-source, reducing time between iterations, and allowing these incremental changes to happen at lightning speed. Every day 16 new Node.js packages are released. That is 16 new projects a day that are (theoretically) providing solutions to previous problems. To quote Clint, it's a bit like drinking from a firehose. Constant learning and flexibility makes this task less painful.

Clint will be a weekend advisor and continue to give sporadic lectures throughout the next 10 weeks. Stay tuned...
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)