Category: Web development General

Understanding Github

To the beginner github, which most developers will assume you just use and understand, can appear quite confounding. You’ll hear words like ‘repository’, ‘commit’, ‘pull’ and as complicated as it sounds, it would only take an hour or so of your time to set up an account and completely understand how it all works.

Github is a version control system. That’s a fancy phrase for simply having some code, and keeping track of the changes you make to it. This is handy, especially for big projects, and if you are collaborating. It’s also useful for deployment (which is the word we use for when you’re actually making your project live on the web and putting it on a web host (more on those in a future post).

The best tutorial I’ve come across on Github is produced by Github itself.

https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/

Check out the link and tutorial above and start by following the instructions to create (and play with) your own repository.

Once you understand the basic terminology you can look into doing the same actions using a shell.

Getting started with Django: Get to know the command prompt!

Getting ready to get ready to get ready to get started ….

You probably don’t remember being three years old and learning to read, but getting started with Django is a bit like that! One does not simply begin to read – we first go through the decomposition stage (unconsciously perhaps) and realise the things that we need to know before we can begin to learn to read. For instance, the magic that is reading cannot happen unless you know the alphabet, have some understanding of phonics, and so on.

What is Django?

So … Django. Django is the ‘web framework for perfectionists with deadlines”. Essentially, it will allow you to work with the python programming language 9and this is the distinguishing feature) in the back-end and make a beautiful website that everyone can interact with. Everyone’s talking about Django and sites like Instagram were built using it. Job sites confirm that Django is on the rise, offering freelancers and contract developers in excess of £500 per day for Django related skills.

The thing no one explicitly tells you need to know …

So what do you need to know to get started? Well, the truth is, for the absolute absolute beginner, you can get started with knowing very little python (or none at all) and again, the most basic understanding of the front-end (html and css). What you do need to know however, is how to use the command line prompt (CMD). No one tells you this explicitly and an absolute beginner gets lost (or scared) trying to get past this first stage, which is actually very simple. So first things first, before you head over to the official Django tutorial, understand what the CMD is, how it works and a few basic commands. The rest will follow ….

What is the Command Prompt?

The Command Prompt in Windows provides access to over 280 commands! These commands are used to do certain operating system tasks from a command line interface instead of the graphical Windows interface we use most of the time.

For example, Command Prompt commands let you copy data to a different folder, format an entire disk, back up your files, send messages to other computers, restart your own computer, and much more. There are also several Command Prompt tricks and hacks that utilize some of these commands. 

Here’s a great site to get started: https://www.lifewire.com/command-prompt-tricks-and-hacks-2618104