{"id":53,"date":"2025-02-07T07:55:17","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T07:55:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hornbuckle\/?p=53"},"modified":"2025-02-07T07:55:17","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T07:55:17","slug":"navigating-githubs-love-hate-rollercoaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/hornbuckle\/2025\/02\/07\/navigating-githubs-love-hate-rollercoaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Navigating GitHub\u2019s Love-Hate Rollercoaster"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On a cold and bitter February afternoon, a computer programmer’s worst nightmare ensued: all git commands stopped functioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I unleashed my best freak-out face: >:0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time was running out while I tried to figure out how to fix it. For my senior capstone, my teammates and I are creating a web-based game using Phaser 3’s framework to create an educational experience on how to fight wildfires. But I needed to push last-minute updates to the game’s codebase. And Git was not cooperating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time, I used WebStorm<\/a>, a Javascript and Typescript IDE, to edit the code, which comes with a lot of bells and whistles, including built-in Git functionality<\/a>. But one day, these tools stopped working. So I switched to using the built-in terminal, but no matter how many branches or clones I made, I was blocked at every turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An Unpopular Opinion to Navigate<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To make matters worse, GitHub and I have a horrible relationship. It’s embarrassing! I avoided learning git commands for years. Ever since my first computer science course, everyone always told me how amazing using GitHub was, whether they were decades-long professionals or first-year college students. What a bunch of bologna!

Eh. The user interface on GitHub’s website was difficult for me to navigate, and for the longest time, I didn’t realize that manually downloading and uploading updated code to GitHub wasn’t ‘normal.’ Or at least, not the best way to use it. And I didn’t understand what the terminology meant. It felt I was being told to ‘branch’ and ‘fork’ when I didn’t want to. Magic forks are weird! And magic branches feel like ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ and that story always made me feel uncomfortable (the cat freaked me out, and I’m a huge cat person, so that was disturbing). Worse, I didn’t understand what happened after calling those commands in the terminal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there’s no way I’m the only computer programmer in the world experiencing these issues!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why I want to show you what I appreciate about GitHub now, and a new technology I’m using that helped me understand GitHub at a deeper level, and makes navigating the steps more fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Basic Commands<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Based on my understanding thus far, which is very limited, this is the most simple workflow to use when making changes to a GitHub repository.<\/p>\n\n\n

git clone # make a copy of the repository
\ngit branch # create a new place to store a copy
\ngit checkout # enter that copy
\ngit pull origin main # merge latest code to branch<\/p>\n

…make code edits…<\/p>\n

git add –all # put changes in a queue (staging)
\ngit commit -m “what you changed” # attach a message to changes
\ngit push origin # upload code changes to main<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are commands that have helped me the most in navigating the crazy web of Git. But given that it’s easy to make mistakes and get lost, GitHub’s documentation<\/a> is a good starting place, and more understandable after already learning the commands I talked about above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I appreciate now about GitHub is that once you understand how a few different steps work, I feel like I’m more in control with how to update different versions of code. I guess since it’s ‘version control,’ that’s appropriate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it did take me a while to get to that point. And although using tools with bells and whistles is convenient, sometimes they obfuscate the process. So when something breaks, it’s really hard to know what went wrong. More confusion leads to more frustration, and it can surprisingly waste a lot of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I ended up finding a technology that technically still has downloadable bells and whistles, but they do make managing versions not only easier to understand, but demonstrate the process<\/em>, and make it clear which steps need to occur in order. Surprisingly, it was with a very common free IDE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ll explain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Visual Solution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I downloaded Visual Studio Code<\/a> and downloaded the following extensions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n