Git Week 1: Should we also teach Netlify deployment?

[illicitonion]

When @frosas taught Git Week 1 recently, he found:

1. They had some spare time at the end, but not enough to start adding cognitively complex topics like branches.
2. The more eager trainees were at a bit of a dead end, without really having areas to explore more on their own.

We should find out how the other cities who recently taught this module felt for time.

If there's agreement that we have time for it, maybe we could introduce the idea that GitHub can do things in response to having code pushed to them. A great example (which we probably teach in the class) could be to introduce Netlify - an auto-deploy hook is a nice simple one, the trainees all know how to make a basic website, and showing them "If you add your website to a GitHub repo, it can automatically be published somewhere on the internet" is a pretty nice "Wow, this is useful and cool" moment.

[SallyMcGrath]

Reporting that NW-4 retro noted that HTML/CSS W1 expects branching but it's not taught; vols ask: can we include it in the Git lesson 1 coursework as prep for W1?

[illicitonion]

Interesting! What does it require branching for? Could we remove that need?

When we were putting together requirements for the git course we were pretty excited when we realised we didn't need branching in the first few months, it would be great to preserve that if possible so that the trainees can get used to the ideas of pushing, pulling, commits, history, and remotes, before they need to think about branches (which can give rise to a bunch of issues we'd like to defer if possible, like merge conflicts, handling accidental commits to main, etc...

[illicitonion]

(Of course we can teach branching if we need to, but it would be great to avoid it if possible...)

[illicitonion]

Aah, it looks like the README on https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/bikes-for-refugees tells them to make a branch, but doesn't really need a branch for any particular reason. Are there any major down-sides to just having the trainees work on main on their fork? (It's not completely real-world, but I think it's probably worth it to simplify the on-ramp to git, and to allow introducing concepts incrementally...)

[SallyMcGrath]

Lol, you found it fast! (I wasn't 100% sure as I didn't teach that part of the day, but it came up in the retro, so was just looking through myself)

I would say.... yes we can just have them work on main in this case. (But in general I think it's a good note to check concepts have been introduced before depending on them!)

[illicitonion]

I put together CodeYourFuture/bikes-for-refugees#76 to update the instructions to be more in-line with how we've taught git at that point in the course (and to link to the handy centralised cheat-sheet we put together with the intention that the trainees would refer to it in this kind of situation) - please take a look!

[SallyMcGrath]

Note: we might do this in Fundamentals! (Controversial)