Tag Archives: github

19 Apr
2017

Where was that GitHub Discussion?

Did GitHub change their activity feed? Or am I getting more confused now I contribute to so many different projects that I’m not a maintainer of? Either way, I struggle sometimes to find the pull request or issue that I had a discussion on to revisit or continue that discussion (yes, I get email notifications – and no, I don’t take good enough care of them to find things that way).

GitHub has brilliant advanced search functionality, and what I wanted was:

is:pr commenter:lornajane sort:updated-desc

Which gives me a list of all the pull requests I’ve commented on, with the most recent first. I couldn’t remember the exact repo name and I also often switch is:pr for is:issue as appropriate, but this search string has been very helpful for finding those odd things you want to follow up on.

Do you have a favourite GitHub search string combination? Would you care to share it in the comments? Thanks :)

02 Jun
2015

Code Reviews: Before You Even Run The Code

I do a lot of code reviewing, both in my day job as principal developer and also as an open source maintainer. Sometimes it seems like I read more code than I write! Is that a problem? I’m tempted to say that it isn’t. To be a good writer, you must be well-read; I believe that to be a good developer, you need to be code-omnivorous and read as much of other people’s code as possible. Code reviews are like little chapters of someone else’s code to dip into.

Over time I’ve developed some particular processes that I find helpful when reviewing code. In particular, I often surprise people at how much review I do before I run the code. Sometimes I grab the branch so that I can use my local diff tools, but I don’t actually execute code until I’ve established some basic facts. This post is a little insight into what’s happening in this not-running-the-code-yet zone. Continue reading →

21 Jan
2015

Gollum the Git-Enabled Wiki

In trying to get company documentation off google docs and people’s laptops and into a more useful format, I have been researching developer-friendly tools for business documentation. Requirements went something like:
– must handle words and documents
– should be available locally, bonus points for revision history
– must publish to the web, and ideally be editable there
– should accept content in markdown
– must have access control (which wiped out my original plan of using a static site generator)

While I worked on this, we were using the wiki feature in GitLab … which pretty much hit the nail on the head. Further investigation showed that the wiki feature in GitLab (and indeed in GitHub) is a ruby gem called Gollum. Continue reading →

01 Jul
2014

Running Pull Request Builds with Jenkins

The joind.in projects are set up so that the build process runs on pull requests when they are opened, which is great! It means that contributors don’t have to wait for one of the maintainers to look at it, only to reject the contribution on something that could be picked up automatically. I’ve had a few questions about the setup so I thought I’d share how it works. Continue reading →
18 Feb
2014

Use a GitHub Branch as a Composer Dependency

My current project sees Celery (a python distributed task queue) added to my PHP application. There’s a handy PHP interface to the RabbitMQ that Celery uses as a backend, which makes it easy for me to create jobs, called celery-php. This requires either the PECL AMQP extension or alternatively it has experimental support for the PHP library for AMQP – I would normally prefer the PECL version but ran into version compatibility problems, missing manual pages, and decided that a pure PHP solution might be more portable and perhaps I would just add the experimental branch to my composer.json file for this project. Continue reading →
28 Jan
2014

GitHub-Powered Changelog Scripts

My current project does periodic releases, we build a few things, then we work on getting a bunch of user feedback and changing/fixing things before we actually release. This means we need to be organised with tags and branches. We’re using GitHub for collaboration, including our issue trackers, commits which contribute to an issue have the issue number in the commit message, and when a branch merges in to the main line, we use the “fixes #42” notation to simultaneously close off the issue that it relates to.

This has been working pretty well, and today I got the question “what’s new since I last saw this project?” – so I created a changelog. It’s rather rough-and-ready but I had fun so I thought I’d share. Continue reading →

06 Jan
2014

Upcoming Git Courses

Three git courses are coming up in the next few weeks, and a few people have asked me which courses I’m running, so here’s a quick roundup (feel free to drop me a line if you need any more detail):

  • Dublin, 30th January: Git and GitHub Foundations
  • Dublin, 31st January: Git and GitHub Advanced
  • London, 6th February: Git for Teams

I have fantastic partners for these events: the Dublin ones are with Github and the London ones with FLOSSUK, and I look forward to both. Right now they all do still have places remaining, visit my courses page for the links you need to book. Training days are a great opportunity to boost your skills and discuss specific aspects of technology that you can’t really get from a textbook – hope to see you at one of these sessions, I am standing by for difficult questions :)

25 Sep
2012

Github API Access Tokens via Curl

I’m working on some demos for a tutorial I’m giving next month and since I’d like to show off Github’s API, I needed an access token for it. They have the usual web flow but I’m cutting as many corners as I can to keep the demos nice and quick, so I looked into the support Github has for generating an API key programmatically. Continue reading →
06 Sep
2012

Do Open Source with Git and Github

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 php|architect magazine.

Often I find absolutely competent programmers, who aren’t involved in open source, either because they don’t know how to approach a project, or because they just aren’t sure how the process even works. In this article we’ll look at one example, the conference feedback site joind.in, and how you can use GitHub to start contributing code to this project. Since so many projects are hosted on github, this will help you get started with other projects, too.

The tl;dr Version for the Impatient

  1. Fork the main repo so you have your own github repo for the project
  2. Clone your repo onto your development machine
  3. Create a branch
  4. Make changes, commit them
  5. Push your new branch to your github repository
  6. Open a pull request

This article goes through this process in more detail, so you will be able to work with git and github projects as you please.
Continue reading →