git commits: digging a bit deeper

When it comes to using git, I've mostly just learned as I go, figuring out whatever it is that I might need as the situation arise. In doing so though, I sometimes gloss over details about how things really work under the hood, so it's nice to be able to learn a bit more by going through the tutorials/videos I mentioned before. In fact, I learned that one incorrect assumption I've made up until now is that I thought that git stored commits as deltas, i.e., storing only bits that have changed from…Read more …

maintaining a clean test environment

One of the tricky things I'm discovering is keeping up with all the changes when you're working on large project. Case in point, recently I was testing out some of my frontend stuff on my local web server. I sometimes worry I've mucked around my dev box too much, so I like to have a separate box that I use as a clean test environment. When I'm using that box, I usually only pull sources down to keep everything up-to-date, but recently when I tried to do that, I ran into several problems:…Read more …

github classes

Recently, I heard about a few online tutorial/classes about git/github. I've gone through some of these and wanted to quickly jot down some thoughts: First, GitHub actually offers training classes! Just a few days ago I took their free online introductory class. It's a 1-hour class that's virtually hosted (through GoToMeeting). For the class I sat in on, two guys (Tim Berlund and Jordan McCullough) were running the show. It's pretty well put together, where one person does live coding/commands and the other fields questions in near real-time from folks who send in…Read more …

git/github workflow

In the past, I've only used github for personal projects, so I didn't have to deal with collaborating with other folks. Now that I'm working on an open-source project, I'm starting to get more familiar with all the cool features of git and github. So here's the scenario: Project A is on github (aka the original repo). Alice has forked Project A on github and created a branch(/patch) off of that fork. (As a side note, the branch was already sent as a pull request to the original repo, but it hasn't been…Read more …

installing apache, tomcat, and mysql on ec2

I'm a bit late jumping on the ec2 boat, but finally got around to checking out what ec2 is like and decided I'd try my hand at JSP while I'm at it. So with that in mind, I decided to go with a linux distro for my ec2 instance. For the most part, I followed these instructions to set up tomcat and mysql: http://coenraets.org/blog/2011/11/set-up-an-amazon-ec2-instance-with-tomcat-and-mysql-5-minutes-tutorial/With that, I was up and running, I used MySQL Workbench (connecting over SSH) to setup a toy database that I could muck around with. Then I started hacking away on…Read more …