Ready4R (2025-04-02): Learning Git and GitHub
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Ready4R (2025-04-02): Learning Git and GitHub
The Courage to Try New Things
I'm reading a book called The Lightmaker's Manifesto about being an activist in tough times, and one of the most important chapters in it is about managing burnout. Even if you are an activist, you can still approach complex problems with curiosity and a sense of play. The other side of it is managing your compassion. You need to take care of yourself first, and not be self-sacrificing.
How to Learn Git and GitHub
One thing I was dying to try out when teaching Git and GitHub: teaching the collaborative parts of github first before teaching the mechanics of Git. Git (the software) is useful on its own, but I think that new users need to be exposed to the collaborative aspects of GitHub (branching pull-requests), in order to really understand why Git collaboration is the heart of open source.
Slides are here: https://hutchdatascience.org/intro_git/
How Git Works
For teaching Git mechanics, I am a big fan of Julia Evan's "How Git Works" zine: https://wizardzines.com/zines/git/ - she breaks Git down into easier to understand chunks. Highly recommended.
I especially like the way she breaks down complicated Git workflows. If you want a gentle hand to help you learn hard git concepts on the command line, look no further.
Publish a Quarto project using GitHub Pages + GitHub Actions
One of the very first workshops I taught for Biodata Club (a data science community at OHSU) was how to use Markdown to publish webpages on GitHub. It still remains one of my most used workshops.
Melissa van Bussel shows you in the below video the modern version of this, including using GitHub Actions to automatically render and publish upon changes.
Thanks for Reading
Short newsletter this week, as I'm on vacation. Thanks for reading, and see you soon!
Best, Ted