My thoughts on Git and working with Git

• The git activity that we completed in class this week was very helpful and a good refresher for me personally I haven’t been forking other people’s repositories so learning what upstream is was really helpful for me to learn how to connect/link repositories together to keep files update to date. I also didn’t know that git is widely used in some circles now even non-CS people use git for collaboration which I didn’t know until this week. I think git is a powerful tool that I probably need to get more used to beyond the basic commands that I use for my own repositories as I don’t make merge/pull requests and instead just commit straight to my repos. I think it was great that Professor Klukowska setup this activity for the non-git users too. The newly introduced git config thing for merge/rebase was really interesting too as all of us students got to solve and fix the problem in class.

• So I’ve started working on my extension named “Seshy” with my groupmates and git has been tremendous in version controlling and preventing version conflicts. My groupmates and I create separate branches and before merging I will check for any conflicts or issues and it’s been nice keeping things separated before merging together. I think the key was communication which we did through discord and we scheduled a time to meet to do some work for the extension. Our extension essentially tracks the user data in a browser session like clicks, session time, scrolling length etc. This was a great opportunity for me to learn how to collaborate with other people on an open source project that we all created. We added every file necessary to make it open source that we know of. I believe that we had some trouble splitting up work as we can’t necessarily work on the file sometimes if one person does a lot and forgets to push it to the main repository and keeps it on their local but it all comes to texting each other and communicating a bunch to make sure that we are all on the same page. In the end, we did split up the tasks quite evenly and it worked out on different branches then merging it all back together on the main. My biggest contributions so far have been making the skeleton for the extension and writing the readme. Writing the readme was interesting as I looked at other readmes and used them as templates for what I should write and do. It seems like a number of readmes also included installion instructions and contributing which I made sure to be separate (well at least some parts of the installation). Overall, I’ve been also learning a lot about how extensions work on FireFox from googling and researching how to implement my idea for our extension, Seshy. Been a lot of fun!