The name is Majd Murad. I'm brand spanking new to the world of programming, even to Twitter and blogging. My background is in the theatre. I communicate in person! This is a whole new world for me! But I'm excited, nonetheless, to start this. I am currently enrolled in Dev Bootcamp, and this is an assignment for Week 1, but I also wanted to take it personally, because I always do. I'm actually thankful that I have to start a blog, because I thought it would be fun to recap what I learn as I go, in case some other newb wanted to learn programing, or even attend DBC (Dev Bootcamp... keep up, people!)
I begin with my mission. My goal is to find a way to be a part of getting classic art forms like the theatre to get with the times! For cripes' sake, local theatres still advertise with postcards and posters! INEFFECTIVE! To quote South Park's Cartman in the episode where he teaches at-risk high school kids, "How do I reach these keeeeeds!" I'm very passionate about everything I do, and I don't expect programming will be an exception. I still plan on continuing theatre once this bootcamp is over (in fact, I have a touring kids' show I'll be doing in March with Golden Thread Productions while I'm in DBC), as well as continuing my mask making business, Arté Masks. Rest assured, my maskmaking website WILL get an update once I become an expert code monkey.
And now for the actual DBC assignment! So far, we've basically just set up our computers. This means setting up with Github and linking it all to my little terminal in my MacBook Pro (my brand new computer I just bought for DBC! SQUEEEE!) I thought I had a small understanding of GitHub, but dang is it cool when you really know what it does! Keep in mind, if there's any information I am incorrect about, I know I'll learn it eventually, but feedback is appreciated! Get in touch with me on twitter! I'm @shaikhmajdi. This handle is a part of my full last name, Murad-al-Shaikh, and a play on words. In Arabic, shaikh mihshi is a stuffed squash/eggplant dish. Mmmm. I thought it was cute. Anyway...
So let's talk git. Git is installed into your terminal directly. It allows you to keep track of any changes you make to any file by keeping a log of each commit you make. A commit is basically like a save, except that it asks you to also leave a comment on what you changed during this save, and it stores line by line changes to the file, showing what lines were added or removed. Neat! This helps so that if you're writing a program and you make a change and all of a sudden it's buggy, you can go back and forth between versions and literally see where the change went wrong. Also neat! All you have to do is type a simple code into your terminal (git log) and you see it all! This is basically version control. Like looking back and forth between an old version of Adobe and comparing it to the newest version by looking at the code (except the Adobe software isn't open source. Can you imagine!)
Next is linking with GitHub. Non-tech people have been asking me what this is, and the best way to explain it so far is it's like Facebook for programmers, but also a library of what everyone has made that is open source. Open source means that these code bits are available for copying, changing, and redistributing (based on license agreements of course). There are also private files that require permission to view, such as the DBC curriculum (no, you can't see it. It's private, duh!). So what's great is that linking my terminal and git to GitHub means that DBC and my classmates can see what I'm working on, as well as the GitHub community (but who cares about my little bits of code right now). Another plus is that if anything crazy happens to my computer, as long as I've pushed my latest commit into GitHub (basically saving my new edited version of my file to what I have on GitHub), I can always pull my files into my theoretically new terminal on my, unstolen, undamaged (or whatever the heck happened to my old laptop) new computer! Kind of like cloud, but a little more complicated. As for how to link git and GitHub, that's not my area of expertise (yet). But here's a link to set up git from the GitHub website. There are lots of resources on this. Simple google search will help.
So that's that! Stay tuned for more! Apparently my next blog entry will be "Prettier" according to DBC. I can't wait to make it!
Your loving blogger, Majd