Posted In: Reflections
Transitioning from CSS to this week’s material was a challenge. Since most of my classmates and I are still working to style our websites with this new programming language, I think most of us were overwhelmed with the ideas presented in this week’s article. Nonetheless, I found the information interesting and helpful for my future editing and improving my blog page.
Specifically, in Dr. Pilsch’s article this week, we learned “how to use Github like a professional” with the use of branching, authoring pull requests, cloning, staging, and pushing. Now these all sound like strange terms, so what do they actually mean?
Branching is how a programmer can tinker with and try new ideas for improving the code of her website without affecting the website as a whole. By using a separate branch instead of the main branch (the “master”) when we commit new changes, we can see how these changes will affect our website before it does.
Authoring pull requests is a fancy way of saying utilizing that code we experimented with in our side branch on our master branch. By creating and then merging a pull request, you can implement the new code you’ve developed separately to your website once you’ve confirmed that it won’t break the site.
Cloning is similar to branching, but it allows much more editing. It is basically copying all the code from your website and working on it somewhere else (like a text editor outside a browser). This is where our use of Visual Studio Code comes in. By cloning our code onto this separate application, we can edit our code and see the results without having to commit the changes onto our actual website just yet.
Pushing is similar to authoring a pull request. If we have finished editing our cloned code in a separate text editor, we can transfer that to our website with a push. This can only be done between a clone and a master branch, but it is simpler than authoring a pull request.
Staging, as it means in github, is a way to separate the changes we do want to implement on our website and the ones we don’t. Organizing your changes into staged and unstaged categories allows you to choose what will be compiled on your actual website before pushing those changes.
To further supplement my understanding of this information, I found a video on the web called “Git & GitHub: Git Pull and Git Push”. This video gave another explanation of how pull and push work, especially on github. But it also explained why it was important.
Basically, the speaker explained that the git pull command updated a website or block of code with any changes made by others. Git push on the other hand updates a website or block of code with the changes you made so others can see them.
I am interested to see how using a separate text editor will help us in the future, since we have only used one on a browser as of now.