2. Project management

This week I worked on getting set up and started with Git.

Using Git

Oh boy. I had never really had much experience with Git at all until mid-way through 2018. I started on GitHub AND had my own private repo that I could blow up as much as I wanted, but now I face a new challenge. How do I use GitLab and how do I do it respectfully? Respectfully meaning not doing the same thing my dad did in 2017 by shutting down the entire repo, but we’ll go into that later. Since I’m new to all of this, I’ll have to tread more cautiously to make sure I don’t disrupt other people working around me.

Markdown

Markdown is a light markup language that uses a plain text formating system. It was made by John Gruber and only supports HTML as of now. I prefer it to regular HTML. HTML was always so messy looking to me (although it produces very nice looking websites) and it’s hard for me to wrap my head around. Markdown seemingly makes everything just a bit easier for me by putting all the style stuff in the .yml file and making it much more readable for people. Although .yml files are not specifically Markdown, they are very useful to use in this case. Here’s an awesome cheat-sheet for Markdown that I found! Insteading of memorizing everything, you can come back to this page and get a bit of help!

Terminal

Terminal was probably one of the trickiest parts of using Git. I’ve never been that good at terminal (to me, everything just moves either way to fast or drags on for forever), so I guess this is the right time to start getting good at it! I used my dad’s site to get a few cheat codes for terminal to help build my own terminal tutorial.

Sublime

Sublime is pretty neat! I downloaded Sublime through this link and used it on my Mac. I like Sublime because it works well with Markdown, has a nice color scheme (yes, I value aesthetics a lot. Why use something that doesn’t look good?), and an easy to follow layout. Sublime catches some mistakes that I usually make and fix them up for me real quick. Overall, Sublime is an easy to use GUI that saves time, and of course, looks pretty awesome too.

Dreamweaver

I used Dreamweaver a lot when I was first starting Git, but it put a lot of random junk that ended up just messing up my code even more. Since Dreamweaver doesn’t work with Markdown, I will not be wasting my time with it.

Resizing Photos

Resizing photos is something that you need to do in order to keep your repo’s size low. I resize my images to a width of about 800 pixels and let the height change in proportion to that. This helps decrease the amount of KB that go into it, therefore making my pictures easier to see and save space in my repo. I made a seperate folder for images that needed to be resized and then after resizing them, I pushed them to my git. To resize photos, you need to click on the photo until it pops up, then go to tools. In tools there should be a setting that says adjust size. Adjust your photos size to whatever you need. Then you need to export your photos as .jpg and set the quality to around somewhere in the middle. Then you move it to your local repo, push it, and you are done!

My Repo

I am so glad to be one of the people who does not have to back up and reset their repo, but I have already used up a significant amount of storage. Around 3% was already wasted on week 1 and thats about 3% too much. At the time, I did not realize the importance of resizing photos so I just added them to the repo and added them in. Since I was used to my own private repo, I may have blown through some of my own storage. Oh well, atleast I know what not to do anymore!

Uploading Files

So there are two ways to upload files. You can use terminal or you can manually enter them. I like manually entering them just because I know that when I push nothing is going to be copied twice.

Making My Website

Overall, making a website (specifcally for FabAcademy) is pretty hard. You have to document every single bit of information the second you get it. If you don’t, it can slip right out of your fingers. Making a website is all about time management and staying focused. I learned that the hard way and whoever is reading this looking for insight probably will too. Every website will tell you to work ahead and to not get left behind, but if you have a busy schedule like me, it’ll most definetly happen. My advice for you is to not beat yourself up about falling behind. Use spiral development to your favor and go back to your earlier webpages. Since those are the ones that get you into global review, make sure they’re nice and detailed. If your files are too big, put a tiny place marker saying that the files are too big and you don’t want to blow up your repo. From what I’ve learned, FabAcademy is not a linear path, nor is fabrication. You’ll always find little niches whenever you’re doing a project and find something that you never really paid much attention to before. Thats noteworthy. Your files just show that you did something (that could be something super cool too!), but your observations and failures and any snafus you might find along the way are going to make your website unique.