The deeper MEMEing
Over the past month, I have been a part of the Pinboard consulting team that competed in the TigerGraph, Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge. The team consisted of 4 talented male coders who have been in the IT industry for longer than I have been alive (statement may be slightly exaggerated) and me. In the initial stages of the project, I volunteered to do any work that would not need a shell or coding terminal which is why I am currently writing blog posts. Despite my technical limitations, the boss has been very patient and encourages me to take on tasks that sometimes may not be in my capacity. (That were not in my capacity at a certain period but are currently being developed as a part of my new technical skill set *insert swavy emoticon*). One of my newest work-related learnings is how to use push and pull requests on GitHub.
Over the summer, my cousin tutored a group of 4–5 year-olds in a coding summer camp and I am certain that they know more about GitHub than me, a master’s degree student working in a tech-based consultancy. As a part of the TigerGraph challenge I volunteered to write the README for our project. For my nontechnical friends, a README file gives you a summary about the other documents you would find in the GitHub repository; the document is supposed to save you before you fall down a rabbit hole. Copy Alice (in Wonderland), she drank a potion just because it said: ‘Drink Me’, if you see any file that says “README” I highly recommend you read it. When Jane (that’s me) volunteered to help with the README I saw no problems, the document was supposed to summarise the agile sprints the team was planning on running through and the outputs expected at each stage.
Easy, right? Maybe… In retrospect, yes sure it was easy; at the time it was not easy. As somebody who never used GitHub before, I was immediately smitten by the new graphical intro into the world of cloud-based storage. The GitHub signup process has been updated and it is now ZHOOZH! Very glamorous, there was a light tunnel and a soaring OCTOCAT; everything in this new world of repositories was bright and shiny, and welcoming — it looked like a platform I could easily integrate with and manoeuvre around.
Insert dramatic change in background music, that is until I started working on the README and more buttons started appearing on the screen and there were new requests and branches and merging options became available. I ran my draft README past the boss who gave me logical suggestions on how I should not share top secret internal information on the README and proposed suitable changes. So, I made the changes, wrote a few more drafts and eventually reached a copy that both met the requirements of the project and had shareable content. My final draft was written right before I left work for the weekend and to avoid any rookie mistakes (because I am intelligent) I hit the ctrl+s button multiple times (as you do, especially after reading enough memes about not saving changes on documents). Hit ctrl+s a few more times for good measure and partied through my weekend with the plan of resuming my README work on Monday morning. Come Monday morning, all my changes had disappeared, and my GitHub README was back to version 01 “The one with all the secret information.” I was horrified and immediately started to google things about broken READMEs and READMEs that do not respond to ctrl+s. Google responded with the following words of wisdom:
“In case of fire
1) Git commit
2) Git push
3) Leave building”
This meme is not a joke, it is not a meme, it was built from the tears of our coding predecessors who would have forgotten to commit their changes and then had to rewrite multiple lines of code. The Git commit button was one of my first few Git mistakes in the project; soon after learning about the commit button, I offered to upload a csv file on the company repository. GitHub expanded the audience that can view my humiliating learnings to include everybody on the team. If you didn’t know, GitHub stores any changes you make. It records a history of Jane Spadigam made mistakes:
Mistake 01: created a folder in the wrong location
Mistake 02: deleted the folder
Mistake 03: uploaded an empty .xls file
Mistake 04: attempted to delete the blank .xls file (which GitHub would not let her delete)
Commit 05: finally uploaded the correct file in the correct location (***TADA***)
On the flip side I can now commit and use the GUI to amend push and pull requests. The good news for beginners like me is that you don’t need to know bash commands to run your requests — you can do almost anything on the user interface! The Graph for All challenge also taught me many things: how to upload files on public repositories and immediately delete them, how to write a decent README and most importantly, how to google memes before I start any new tasks.
Use memes as a guide to help you find the humour in your journey through the unknown. Take heart fellow tech newbies not knowing about the different tech platforms is not the end of the world — it just means there’s more worlds to explore.
