Development Team: Making Strides

The Development Team met yesterday to reinforce our understanding of how to use GitHub to share our code and to try implementing some of the recommendations we received from the Design team with regard to our site. We established a list of rules for using Git that we are all committed to memorizing (or else we risk breaking branches, destroying the site, and creating extra work for ourselves). The rules are:

  1. Pull before you push- any time we sit down to work on the code for the site we should remember to pull the code on each of our branches to ensure that we receive all the changes our colleagues have made and that we don’t end up with conflicts.

  2. Don’t pull another branch into the Master branch- we want to keep the master branch clean!

  3. Always check what branch you’re on whenever you make any changes (so that everyone else knows which branch to switch to when they are pulling the updates).

  4. In order to delete other branches, you must be on the Master branch.

  5. We don’‘t pull files- we’re only pulling code.

  6. Don’t use capital letters or spaces in file names.

We also discovered, thanks to Alex and another colleague in the libraries, Seth Robertson’s choose your own adventure guides to Git, http://sethrobertson.github.io/GitPostProduction/gpp.html, and the one we’‘ll probably use the most (since it helps you resolve merge conflicts and committing errors): http://sethrobertson.github.io/GitFixUm/fixup.html

Once we had nailed down this set of rules to live and program by, we moved on to editing the CSS for our site’s homepage. We were able to insert a title into the header and to create a background image for the entire homepage. Our next steps will be centering the title, changing the font and size, and attempting to insert a navigation menu toward the bottom of the page. This all may sound very cryptic or, to those who are very familiar with coding and with Git, very basic, but having these rules crystallized has been extremely helpful for our team as we move forward in building the site.

devteam

(Our abstract and slightly insane visual understanding of how each member of the development team uses GitHub and connects to the Git repository)

Meredith Levin

Author: Meredith Levin

Meredith Levin has been the Western European Humanities Librarian at Columbia since February 2014. She has a B.A. in English and American Literature, an M.A. in Italian Studies from NYU and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from LIU’s Palmer School. Her research interests include Anglo-American expatriates in Europe in the 18th-20th centuries, women’s Grand Tour travel narratives, and Fascist colonial policy and culture in North Africa. She is researching the history and construction of Riverside Church for this project.