Moving up to the big leagues
This may come as a shock to most of you, but I am not Eli Manning. We have, essentially, nothing in common. He spent his entire career successfully, for the most part, running one offense. That will not be your experience at Flatiron. However, his iconic facial expressions summarize how I felt switching from Learn to Git.
Call me dramatic, but this is scarily accurate. Unlike Eli, we are not taught one way to run the offense. Manning’s entire career was with the New York Giants. Here at Flatiron, we will be learning many different languages and processes. Therefore, as students always learning new ways to do new things, we’re more like this guy:
No that isn’t Conner McGregor, though the resemblance is pretty striking in the right light. This, is Ryan Fitzpatrick. In the NFL he is what is considered a professional journeyman. Every year he shows up on a new team, runs that offense for a season or two, and then moves on to the next big thing.
Over the next few months, our journey will be like Fitzmagic’s career; a constant learning of new languages and ways to do things. This can get, in a word, overwhelming.
Now, it doesn’t help when your first transition makes you do this:
So I’m here to talk you through it. Learn from my mistakes, and get comfortable being uncomfortable with new terminals, languages, and processes.
Okay, so the first thing you should get comfortable with is navigating the terminal. You can CD into and out of appropriate directories with different variations of the command “CD”, as seen below.
Once you are in the directory you want to be in, you should clone your lab. This can be done by typing “git clone” followed by the SSH, which can be found on Github.
Oops, wrong image.
That’s better. So, after successfully cloning the lab, you need to CD (change directory) into that directory. This is done in the same way as before.
Before continuing, it may be a good idea to learn some commands to see where you are. If you enter “git branch” into your terminal, you will see that after cloning you are still in the master branch.
The branch you are in is depicted by * and is also green. Since you do not want to mess up the master branch and potentially the work of hundreds of students, you need to create and label a branch of your own with “git checkout -b.
Don’t forget, this command is followed by whatever name you want to give to the branch you are creating. if you enter “git branch” again, you will see that you are now out of the master copy, and in your own.
Finally, it is time to start coding. Once you are here, all you need to do is enter “code .” which will whatever coding platform you use (Visual Studio Code is great, definitely recommend).
Getting started, as you can see, has many steps. This led to a lot of confusion for me at the beginning, especially because I was simultaneously learning to use a Mac for the first time. However, after doing these commands a couple of times, you will eventually get the hang of it.
