Ideas after teaching workshop

[jmvera255]

@sstevens2

After teaching the workshop yesterday, I had the following ideas:

• make a mini-workshop version of the lesson that fits within ~3.h hours. Currently the estimated timing of this lesson is 4 hours.
• I'd like to see the Remotes in GitHub episode come sooner in the workshop which looks like this is the case in the main SWC version but additionally do more work in GitHub in parallel with local Git, for example would it be possible to setup the conflict example to occur when pulling a remote from GitHub or something like that?

[sstevens2]

Thanks for the feedback @jmvera255! Some thoughts below.

• make a mini-workshop version of the lesson that fits within ~3.h hours. Currently the estimated timing of this lesson is 4 hours.

What would you cut in this shorter version? We've kind of left it up to individual instructors to cut at present. When I taught it in May I did manage to get to PRs in 3.5 hrs. Though it would have been nice to spend a little longer with the remotes lesson.

• I'd like to see the Remotes in GitHub episode come sooner in the workshop which looks like this is the case in the main SWC version but additionally do more work in GitHub in parallel with local Git, for example would it be possible to setup the conflict example to occur when pulling a remote from GitHub or something like that?

I said the same thing in a convo I had with @ChristinaLK after the workshop. It isn't so much that the remotes lesson really comes earlier in the swc git novice lesson but rather that we moved up conflicts so it works with branches instead of doing the conflict in the remote with a collaborator like swc lesson does. Having taught the swc way many times before, it isn't always predicable that both collaborators will edit in the right way to get a conflict (and the added difficulty of partnering people up, esp online, is complicated). I also think doing the conflict in the cloud increases the cognitive load compared to doing it in branches. I do think we should move the remotes lesson up, but I would probably move it up before branches or maybe before gitignore.
Moving up the remotes lesson might take a bit of work since then you would want to have them continue to update their repo in the lessons that come after it (which would be good practice pushing and pulling). Would you be interested in working on a PR to make those changes? If not, I'll probably get it it later in spring.

[sstevens2]

One downside to moving up when we teach github is for workshops where we don't teach github. The way the lesson is split now has you learn all the local stuff without using github at all first.

[t4k]

We've been teaching Carpentry workshops differently over Zoom than we do in person this last year: 1-hour sessions over multiple days to combat Zoom-fatigue.

I just finished 2 one-hour days of "Advanced Git" in which I adapted parts of your customized lesson and they worked really well! Thank you for this work!

A few notes:

• I wanted to cover branching and GitHub pull requests, which are not in the official Git lesson
• In the first hour I used your Branching lesson + most of the Conflicts section (even though we covered conflicts in the Intro to Git workshops a few weeks ago; the way you created conflicts through branching was illustrative, I thought) + Forking on GitHub (I stopped the first day right after we synced our own fork locally with the upstream repo); this combination was right at 1 hour of teaching time for me and seemed like a natural break
• In the second hour I finished out the Pull Requests lesson; it was really fun!; I demonstrated more of the GitHub UI than the lesson calls for; I particularly included editing some files in the GitHub online editor, which I think impressed people
• It got a little tricky (having never taught it before) at the part with a conflict in a pull request and having to pull upstream main into my local add-country branch in order to resolve the conflict; in the end it did seem like that was the right way to do it, but I stumbled a bit in the explanation
• Even with the Forking part cut out of Pull Requests I still have almost exactly an hour of teaching

Thanks again!

—Tommy (& the Caltech Library Carpentry Team)

[ChristinaLK]

these notes are really useful! Thanks @t4k

[sstevens2]

Seconding the thanks @t4k ! This is really great feedback to hear! Your timings are also really helpful!

• I've never gotten to the part where you fix a conflict in the PR, so I'm really excited to hear your feedback. Would love to hear if you have suggestions for where we might add better explanation to the lesson or if you wanted to make PR to add more explanation that would be very welcome!
• I love the idea of also showing what you can do in GitHub interface! Was there a particular part you felt worked well doing it in the GitHub interface? Or do you think we should add an episode with more on that?