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Lesson #1: What's In Your Toolbox
The best place to start is to evaluate what exactly you have in your toolbox and what else you need to obtain. Before this lesson, I asked you to add a few items to your toolbox: slack, a github account and a text editor. There is a purpose behind it all for this is really all you need to get started. Allow me to explain!
Slack - Communication platform built to create a community
I’ve always loved Slack, but there are several other communication platforms out there in the world: Discord, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Spark. I chose slack to be our basis of communication for a number of reasons:
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Easy Integration. There are so many apps that you can integrate with Slack to make your team work together better. They also have fun little easter eggs like the
giphyapplication that allows you to respond in gifs with a simple/giphy [text]command - Community. I didn’t want another Facebook group or groupme chat to bring us all together. But I did want a place where we can connect as one group and make meaningful connections with one another more directly.
- Popularity. I’ve either used Slack or some similar communication platform to connect with my coworkers or peers on projects.
Github - a system that uses git, a version control software so you can version, share, collaborate and deploy code.
Github is like a social media platform for developers. Instead of posting photos, you’re posting your coding projects. You can “like” other’s projects and follow other people, and “repost” projects and add your own twist to them. There are other platforms that do the same job as Github like Gitlab and BitBucket, but in my experience and research this is the easiest and best supported.
Git is the version control software that Github uses to keep track of what is happening to your coding projects.
What does version control mean? Anytime you work in your project, anytime you save a change (in git we call that committing a change), you’re able to go back to that “snapshot” of the project and restart from there if you find yourself in a pigeon hole. Just like if checkpoints in video games, if you fail a challenge you can restart at the checkpoint. Best thing about git, is that you can create checkpoints whenever and how ever often you want!
Why use a version control software? I always put every project on github, because you can never predict when your laptop is going to crash/get stolen and you don’t want to lose all the work you’ve done. In college, I started writing my essays in google drive so I can work anywhere and the auto-saves literally save my butt anytime my computer crashed. (And now, google drive has “revision history” so its now even a little more like git)
With a version control software you are able to work anywhere, with anyone, at anytime. Pretty cool, huh?
Text Editor - interface that allows you to open and edit your code in an user-friendly environment
Text editors are like the autocorrect for your code. If you really wanted to, you could code in Microsoft Word and copy/paste to Github, but you’d be doing 8473432x the work. Great text editors keep tract of key words and variables that you set, so you spend less time searching and debugging your code and more time implementing your solution. I personally use Atom, but some other options for Windows users are Sublime Text.
Are any of these tools absolutely necessary to succeed in technology? No. Do they make your life a whole lot easier, ABSOLUTELY. And if for no other reason, Momma Pfaff used to always say..
”If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you do good.”