Workflows

“I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.”

• Kent Beck

Learn the skills required to work a collaborative software project using only Markdown. Limiting your projects to Markdown lets you focus on the big picture without getting distracted by more challenging code.

• Learning Objectives: what you will learn from this module
• Suggested Study: Helpful links for this module, useful but not required.
• Deliverables: Projects to practice applying the learning objectives in context
• Lesson Plans: A few ideas for running lessons around this material.
• Study Tips
• Setting Up
• Code Quality Scripts

Learning Objectives

1. Local Development Without Git

Practice the foundational workflows of software development by learning to write Markdown locally on your own computer using Visual Studio Code (VSCode), the Command Line Interface (CLI), and NPM scripts to automate your code's quality (formatting, linting and spell checking).

• Folder Structures: You can explain how files and folders are stored in your computer and can find, open or create files in your computer without using the Command Line Interface.
• Command Line Interface (CLI): In a Unix shell you can ...
• open a new terminal window
• navigate up and down directories using cd
• list the contents of a directory using ls
• view the contents of a file using cat
• create new files using touch
• create new folders using mkdir
• Markdown: You can write a document in Markdown with no syntax mistakes that renders into a well-formatted document.
• VSCode: You can complete these workflows in VScode, and can use keyboard shortcuts to complete them all:
• Opening a repository in a new window
• Opening the VSCode terminal
• Adding a new file
• Adding a new folder
• Deleting a file
• Deleting a folder
• Previewing a Markdown File
• Formatting a Markdown document
• READMEs: You can write a README file that describes the project you are working on, why it's helpful, and how someone can use it.
• NPM: You can use NPM commands to verify your code's quality, this includes ...
• using npm install to install a project's dependencies
• reading a package.json file to find which scripts are available for the project
• use npm run <script> to execute an npm script
• Formatting Code: You can use Prettier to make sure all the code in your project is well-formatted:
• You can use the Prettier VSCode extension to format a document while you are writing it
• You can use npm run format to format all of the documents in your project
• You can use npm run format:check to make sure all files are well-formatted
• Linting Folder and File Names: You can ...
• use npm run lint:ls to check all folder and file names in your project
• you can fix all linting mistakes reported by npm run lint:ls
• Linting Code: You can ...
• use npm run lint:md to check all Markdown files in your folder for linting mistakes
• you can fix all linting mistakes reported by npm run lint:md
• Spell Check: You can ...
• use the Code Spell Checker VSCode extension to correct spelling mistakes in your Markdown documents while you are writing
• use npm run spell-check to check the spelling in all the files of your project
• update .cspell.json to add words that should be allowed in your project
• File and Folder Naming Conventions: You can ...
• identify and follow the naming conventions for the project you are working on.
• use npm run lint:ls to check that all files and folders follow the project's naming conventions.
• you can correct any file and folder names to make them match the project conventions.
• File Extensions: You can identify all of the languages covered at HYF and give the correct file extension. You don't need to know the languages, just recognize them.
• Touch Typing: You can write a Markdown file without looking at your keyboard to find any letters, numbers or special characters. (slowly is ok!)

2. Local Development With Git

Practice using Git to save and organize your development process. You will learn how you can use Git to go back to previous versions of your project, and to work on different changes in parallel.

• Git: Using the CLI you can ...
• Initialize a new git repository with git init
• stage changes using git add <path>
• check what is staged with git status
• commit changes using git commit -m <message>
• display your repository's git history using git log
• create a new branch using git branch <branch-name>
• check out a branch using git checkout <branch-name>
• create a new branch and check it out using git checkout -b <branch-name>
• merge changes from one branch to another using git merge <branch-name>
• return to a previous version of your project with git log and git checkout <commit-hash>
• stash and retrieve uncommitted changes with git stash and git pop
• .gitignore: You can use a .gitignore file to describe which files you don't want included in your git history.
• VSCode: You can ...
• use the Git Graph extension to to visualize your repo's commit history
• use the Git Lens extension to investigate your repository's commit history
• explain how the file tree in VSCode can show you which files have uncommitted changes
• Atomic Commits: You can save your development progress using small commits with clear and helpful message.
• Feature Branches: You can organize your development process using branches. You can create a new branch for each part of your project and merge those changes to main when they are finished.

3. Local/Remote Development

Learn how you can connect your local Git repositories with a GitHub repository to add more structure to your development process and to share your projects.

• Licenses: You can ...
• explain why it's important to include a license for your code on GitHub
• choose a license for your projects that matches how you want others to use your code
• GitHub SSH Key: You can connect your computer to your GitHub account using an SSH key, clone using the SSH link, and push/pull using your SSH connection.
• GitHub Repositories: You can ...
• create new repository on GitHub
• write a description for your repository
• turn on GitHub Pages
• configure your repository to block pushing to main
• configure your repository to block merging to main until Continuous Integration (CI) checks have passed
• Git Remote/Local Connection: You can ...
• clone a remote repository to your computer
• initialize a new repository locally and connect it to an empty remote repository
• push and pull changes between remote & local branches
• Pull Requests: You can create a pull request between two branches in your repository and merge changes without causing any conflicts.
• PR templates: You can use a PR template to add a checklist to all of your PRs so you are sure the code is great before merging to main.
• Continuous Integration: You can use GitHub Actions to check your code's quality before merging a pull request to the main branch.
• Local/Remote Branching Workflow: You can use a branching workflow that keeps mistakes away from the main branch and prevents conflicts from happening in GitHub. For each contribution to the project you can ...
  1. Check out a new local branch and write your code
  2. Check out main on your local machine
  3. Pull changes from remote main to local main
  4. Merge changes locally from main to your new branch
     • Fix any conflicts on your new branch before pushing!
  5. Format and lint your code
  6. Push your new local branch to your remote repository
  7. Open a Pull Request from the new branch to main
     • Go through the PR's checklist to make sure everything is correct
     • Make sure all CI checks pass!
  8. Merge your new remote branch to main
     • You can delete the branch after it's merged if you want to

4. Remote Collaboration

Learn how to collaborate with a group on a single project hosted in a GitHub repository. Practice using GitHub's project management features to organize your group's tasks and to double-check your project's code quality.

• Contributor Guidelines: Your group can define contributor guidelines that describes how everyone can add their work to the project.
• Code of Conduct: Your group can write a code of conduct for your project that describes how everyone should communicate and what behavior is considered unproductive.
• Repository Contributors: You can add group members as collaborators in a repository.
• Issue Templates: Your group can use issue templates to make sure all issues are complete and relevant to the project. in your repository and merge changes without causing any conflicts.
• Code Review: You can use the PR Template and CI checks to review another group member's code before merging it to main.
• GitHub Project Management: You can ...
• use issues to define tasks in a group project. Each issue should have a helpful title, complete description, and helpful labels.
• use a Project Board to organize a project's issues
• claim issues and track your progress with the project board
• link a PR to your claimed issue
• assign someone to review your PR
• use GitHub code review features to discuss your code with your reviewer
• Fixing Merge Conflicts: You can fix merge conflicts by selecting which change to keep, or deciding how to combine them. If a conflict occurs in a GitHub PR you can pull both branches and fixh the conflict locally.

5. Open Source Development

Explore the wider world of Open Source software by learning how communities of independent developers write and maintain the code we all rely on.

• Finding Issues: You can read through an open source project's issues and determine if there is one you can help with.
• Commenting in Issues: You can productively join the conversation in an open source projects' issues.
• Opening Issues: You can open a helpful issue in an open source repository, following their contributor guidelines and code of conduct.
• Contributing: You can create a fork of an open source project and open a PR that contributes something helpful and follows the Contributor Guidelines and Code of Conduct.

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Study Tips

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• Don't rush, understand! Programming is hard.
  • The examples and exercises will still be there to study later.
  • It's better to fail tests slowly and learn from your mistakes than to pass tests quickly and not understand why.
• Don't skip the examples! Understanding and experimenting with working code is a very effective way to learn programming.
• Write lots of comments in the examples and exercises. The code in this repository is yours to study, modify and re-use in projects.

Study Board

Creating a project board on your GitHub account for tracking your study at HYF can help you keep track of everything you're learning. You can create the board at this link: https://github.com/your_user_name?tab=projects.

These 4 columns may be helpful:

• todo: material you have not studied yet
• studying: material you are currently studying
• to review: material you want to review again in the future
• learned: material you know well enough that you could help your classmates learn it

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Setting Up

You will need NPM installed on your computer to study this material

1. Clone this repository:
   • using HTTPS: git clone https://github.com/HackYourFutureBelgium/bf-workflows.git
2. navigate to the cloned repository
   • cd bf-workflows
3. Install dependencies:
   • npm install

It's highly recommended that you use either Linux or Mac. If you have a Windows computer you can either dual-boot your computer or install a virtual machine.

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Code Quality Scripts

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This repository comes with some scripts to check the quality of this code. You can run these scripts to check the code provided by HYF, and to check the code you write when experiment with the examples and complete the exercises.

npm run format

This script will format all of the code in this repository making sure that all the indentations are correct, the code is easy to read, and letting you know if there are any syntax errors.

npm run format:check

Checks the formatting of all files in the repository and throws an error if any files are not well-formatted.

npm run spell-check

This script will check all of the files in your repository for spelling mistakes. Spelling is not just a detail, is important! Good spelling helps others read and understand your programs with less effort.

spell-check is not so clever though, it doesn't have all possible words in it's dictionary and it won't know if you wanted to spell a word incorrectly. If you think one of it's "Unknown word"s is not a problem, you can either ignore the suggestion or add the word to the "words": [ ... ], list in .cspell.json.

npm run lint:md

This script will lint all the Markdown files in this repository, checking for syntax mistakes and other bad practices. Fixing linting errors will help you learn to write better code by pointing out your mistakes before they cause problems in your program.

Some linting errors will take some practice to understand and fix, but it will be a good use of time.

npm run lint:ls

This script will lint the names of all files and folders in the project to check that they follow the project naming convention (kebab-case).

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