I’ve had brief encounters with GitHub over time but not enough to gain any muscle memory. As I’m finalizing the last bits of static content for my website, learning how to work with GitHub makes a good side project.
https://github.com/rpchurchill
I’ve poked around in a few repositories to get the feel of what they’re doing and how it all fits together, I’ve worked through the course at Code Academy, and I’ve used it a bit from the command line but that’s no substitute for using it consistently over time in different modes.
The first new repository I created, beyond the ones that already existed from the aforementioned encounters, is for the discrete-event simulation project. As it stands now this project is just one big file with all of the flotsam and jetsam in it from my stream-of-consciousness explorations, and a couple of supporting framework files I’ll never touch. My workflow has been to create a new version of it with every update, appended with the date in the form discrete-event-sim_yyyymmdd.html, upload it to my site, and make it available in an iframe embedded in that day’s WordPress post. If I want to make it easy to view as a standalone page on a mobile device I include a separate link to it.
This workflow has been pretty effective for me. I have all of the dated versions of the code in a directory on my computer and on my web host, so I know what’s going on, but in the longer run the main file will have to get cleaned up, divided into modules, and made available in a form amenable to being worked on by more than one person.
This part of the effort is on the project’s To Do list anyway, so I’m killing multiple birds with this stone. Over time I’ll add repositories for other projects I have worked on or am working on, and we’ll see where it goes.