git merge dev
Pull requests are a fundamental skill for software developers. Today, we teach students what they are, why they matter, and how to make them
What an exciting time to be in CS Capstone!
After a huge push to move away from design and move towards developing our website, we've made substantial progress on our website. We began class first by teaching everyone an extremely fundamental skill in software development: how to make a pull request. It may be okay for smaller projects to directly commit to a main branch, but on a big project like ours, pull requests help maintain order and cleanliness in our repository. Students can create their own branch based off of the dev branch and create components or pages that were assigned to them. When they are done, they create a pull request to merge their changes into the dev branch; their changes are then reviewed by others before they go through. In my opinion, the excitement of having your very own code being reviewed and accepted into the dev branch helped to motivate students to get their work done. Before class, we've had a measly 5 commits in our repo created by various contributors (that's 3 weeks worth of commits!). By the end of the very next day, we've gotten a huge increase in code contributions. Someone even submitted their pull request at 1:36 AM.
The pages we currently have content for are as follows: homepage, donate page, classmates page, and login page. Next class, we will setup GitHub actions to automatically deploy production and dev builds onto DigitalOcean, where we are hosting the website. We also hope to get some more progress from the backend team, as their login and user account endpoints will be very important for us to use when developing the frontend.
Here's a snapshot of our progress so far:
