Group Coding — Harder than you think. (Shout-out to SourceTree)

This week I finished my first big group assignment with the Iron Yard Atlanta. Though I’m still grasping the basics of what it means to code, still scratching the surface of Javascript, and newer frameworks for CSS like Bourbon and Neat, I think the most difficult task I’ve yet encountered is merging developer branches on GitHub.

I got the gist of it down (no pun intended for you githubbers, reference) eventually after repeatedly walking through it with my group members, shout outs to Jamie, Jim, and Khalif. So here’s a walk through of what we noobs did, in step-by-step format.

1. Each of us created a developer branch [user-dev]. I, as the repository mod, created a master-developer [master-dev] branch as well.
2. I uploaded the initial template (with just a basic layout of the webpage divisions) to the master-dev.
3. All users merge master-dev into their own branches.
4. Each user submits changes within their branch.
5. Changes are then merged back into master-dev, user-by-user.

This took much practice and discussion, but we had it down to a science at the end. At one point someone had cross-saved our Sass and CSS files SourceTree, a repository monitoring resource I highly recommend, allowed us to retrieve the original files from the previous merge. Here’s a peek at SourceTree for our project, which was a life-saver at times similar to the afore-mentioned.

We had over 40 updates in the end, which is a bit high from what I gather from other groups’ repositories, but in the end we had a nice, well-detailed page with a lot of cool features. Group work is inevitable for someone getting into web development and design, and with such tools as SourceTree and GitHub [and Gist], becoming a “people-person” is that much easier.